In 1988, Johnson was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for fundamental contributions to discrete optimization and software design, and its practical applications to distribution and manufacturing systems.
From 1990 to 1993, Johnson began teaching and conducting research at Georgia Tech, where he co-founded and co-directed the Logistics Engineering Center with Professor George Nemhauser.
Johnson's research interests in logistics include crew scheduling and real-time repair, fleet assignment and routing, distribution planning, network problems, and combinatorial optimization.
Their work combines theory with algorithm development, computational testing, and solution of hard real-world problems in the best tradition of Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
[4] The selection committee cited among Johnson's contribution three important and influential papers he produced in the early seventies—two of them with Ralph Gomory—which developed and extended in significant ways the group theoretic approach to integer programming pioneered by Gomory.