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Seminar

18 NOV 2016 Seminar

Series of Dept Research Seminars - “A Multi-Source Inventory System with Stochastic Lead Times: Optimal Policy and Heuristics" (Date: 28 November 2016)

Dr. Li XIAO

Dr. Li XIAO

Our speaker Dr. Li XIAO would like to share with us on "A Multi-Source Inventory System with Stochastic Lead Times: Optimal Policy and Heuristics" :

Multi-source inventory systems provide many advantages and have been widely adopted in practice. In addition, several new tracking technologies, such as RFID and mobile devices, provide managers with real-time supply information. In this work, we study multi-source inventory system and investigate the optimal policy and several of the heuristics, using supply system’s real-time information.

We first consider a single-product, two-source inventory system. Inventory can be replenished through a normal supply source, which consists of a two-stage tandem queue with exponential production time at each stage. We can also place an emergency order by skipping the first stage, for a fee. We develop a fairly novel approach, to obtain optimal ordering policies for the discounted or long-run average cost. The basic idea of this approach is to reduce the original three-dimensional system to an equivalent two-dimensional system, by transforming the original problem to a new problem with service rate controls for a tandem queue with two servers.

Second, we consider a single-product, multi-source inventory system with expediting options. We develop performance evaluation tools for a family of reasonable ordering and expediting policies. Performance evaluation of such state-dependent policies is generally hard. The main thrust is to show that, under these policies, the supply system becomes a network of queues with a special routing mechanism. We show that under several alterations of the general policy, the solution has a simple product form and thus we obtain closed-form performance measures.

All are welcome and no registration is in need.

Date

28 November 2016 (Monday)

Time

9:30 – 10:30 

Venue

HW-828

Speaker

Dr. Li XIAO is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School. She holds a PhD degree in Decision Sciences from National University of Singapore, a Master’s degree in Operational Research and Cybernetics from Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Bachelor’s degree in Information and Computing Sciences from Wuhan University. Her research interests mainly lie in the field of stochastic models, with an emphasis on analysis and control of service systems and supply chains. Her research has been published in Operations Research.

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