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                Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Date: March 2, Friday, 4:30 - 5:30pm.

Title:  Worst-Case Analysis of Process Flexibility Designs with Price Differentials

Speaker: Xuan Wang, Assistant Professor at the School of Business and Management​, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Abstract:  

In the operations literature, the theoretical investigation of the effectiveness of limited flexibility has mainly focused on the performance metric that is based on the maximum sales in units. However, this could lead to substantial profit losses when the maximum sales metric is used to guide flexibility designs whereas the products have considerably large price differences. We address this issue by introducing price differentials into the analysis of process flexibility designs. We introduce the Profit Plant Cover Index (PPCI) and prove that a general class of worst-case performance measures can be expressed as functions of the designs PPCIs and the given uncertainty set. Moreover, the PPCIs lead to a partial ordering that enables us to compare the worst-case performance of different designs. Applying these results, we prove that under the so-called part-wise independently symmetric uncertainty sets and a broad class of worst-case performance measures, the alternate long chain design is optimal among all long chain designs in which there are two product categories and the number of high profit products is equal to that of low profit products. Finally, we develop a heuristic based on the PPCIs for generating flexibility designs that perform well under expected profit.

Joint work with Shixin Wang and Jiawei Zhang.

Bio:

Xuan Wang is an Assistant Professor in Operations Management at the School of Business and Management​, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her main research interests lie in the broad area of decision-making under uncertainty with applications in supply chain optimization and revenue management. Xuan holds a Ph.D. in Operations Management from the Stern School of Business at New York University, and a Bachelor in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.​

Everyone is welcome to attend the talk!
 

Venue: Room 513,William M.W. Mong Engineering Building
(ERB),(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2) The Chinese University of
Hong Kong.
 

The talk will be hosted by:
Prof. Gao Xuefeng,
Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
E-mail: xfgao@se.cuhk.edu.hk
Homepage: http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/people/xfgao.html

SEEM-5202 Website:  http://seminar.se.cuhk.edu.hk
Email:  seem5202@se.cuhk.edu.hk