Jaap Wessels

Jacobus (Jaap) Wessels (19 January 1939 – 30 July 2009) was a Dutch mathematician and Professor of Stochastic Operations Research at the Eindhoven University of Technology, known for his contributions in the field of Markov decision processes.

Born in Amsterdam, Wessels started to study Mathematics and Physics at the University of Amsterdam in 1956, where in 1963 he received his MA. He graduated in 1968 at the Eindhoven University of Technology advised by Jacques F. Benders with a thesis entitled "Decision rules in Markovian decision problems with Incompletely known transition probabilities" about Markov decision processes.

In 1960, Wessels started his academic career at the University of Amsterdam as assistant to Jan Hemelrijk, an authority in the field of stochastic processes.

During his doctoral research, Wessels was employed as research assistant at the Technical University of Eindhoven.

In 1973, he was appointed Professor of Applied Probability Theory at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.

In 2000, he retired from the Eindhoven University of Technology.

He kept participating in International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and EURANDOM.

Wessels' most cited work is the 2000 publication Model-based decision support methodology with environmental applications, edited with Andrzej Wierzbicki and Marek Makowski.

In the introduction they acknowledge about decision making:

This publication gives in three parts (Methodology, Decision Support Tools, Environmental Applications) an overview of the field.

Wessel authored and co-authored dozens of publications in the field.

Books, a selection:

On July 30, 2009 he died in Veldhoven.

Among his doctoral students were Jo van Nunen, Kees van Hee, Henk Zijm, Eric van Damme and Wil van der Aalst.

Wessels was president of the Vereniging voor Statistiek (VVS), and has contributed to the foundation of the National Network Mathematical Decision Making (LNMB), the research school BETA, and European Institute for Statistics, Probability, Stochastic Operations Research and its Applications (EURANDOM).

Wessels' research interests focused on topics such as queuing theory, neural networks and structured Markov processes, and more specifically "decision support methodology and he applies his favorite research topics in operations management, communication processes, manpower policy making and environmental problems."