(The Catholic University of America, USA)
Gunnar Lucko is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering and the Director of the Construction Engineering and Management Program at Catholic University of America. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from Virginia Tech and a 5-year German diploma in structural and environmental engineering from Hamburg University of Technology. He has over eight years of research experience in project planning, where he has explored novel techniques to model and analyze schedules and their interactions with aspects like resources and costs using singularity functions. His other research interests include construction equipment operations and economics; simulation and optimization methods; and engineering education. In recent research funded by the National Science Foundation he expands scheduling theory with an objective approach to strategically allocate float, which mitigates delays on the critical path and thus reduces risk. In previous funded research projects he has investigated cash flow optimization and related financial phenomena and developed new algorithms for criticality and float calculation in linear scheduling with singularity functions. He serves as past chair of the Construction Research Council, the premier association of North American construction researchers within the American Society of Civil Engineers, and senior specialty editor of the Journal Construction Engineering and Management. He is member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences Simulation Society and the Scheduling Community of Practice of the Project Management Institute.