Please join us in welcoming Sila Cetinkaya, professor from Southern Methodist University. She will be discussing the stochastic clearing in the outbound supply chain.
4290 Fitts-Woolard Hall
https://ncsu.zoom.us/j/91616704400?pwd=UTZZRmFVSE9MQVJZWkZyUVJCZEU3dz09
Meeting ID: 916 1670 4400
Passcode: 124219
Stochastic Clearing in the Outbound Supply Chain: Applications, Models, and Optimal Policies
Stochastic clearing theory has widespread applications in the context of supply chain and service operations management. Historical application domains include bulk service queues, inventory control, and transportation planning (e.g., vehicle dispatching and shipment consolidation). In this presentation, we focus on applications arising in the context of outbound delivery operations involving active efforts for supply optimization under shipment consolidation. Although this topic has received academic attention in the literature, the structure of exact optimal polices has not been explored previously. We discuss and compare alternative operational policies for clearing decisions and develop a generalized, exact stochastic dynamic inventory model to consider explicit efforts and costs associated with temporal shipment consolidation of outbound deliveries. The resulting model is applicable in contemporary distribution settings where the supplier offers outbound delivery services and covers the corresponding costs. We formulate the problem via a backward stochastic dynamic programming approach and examine the optimal joint policy prescribing a joint inbound-outbound inventory policy. The structure of exact optimal policies is discovered by introducing and utilizing new notions of generalized convexity. We prove that clearing-type policies are not necessarily optimal due to the interplay between inbound and outbound fixed costs.
Sila Çetinkaya is Cecil H. Green Professor and Department Chair of Operations Research and Engineering Management in the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. She holds courtesy appointments with SMU Cox School of Business and UT Southwestern Medical Center. Çetinkaya’s research interests include supply chain and service operations, stochastic optimal control theory, and applied probability. Her publications appeared in some of the most reputable outlets of industrial and systems engineering including Operations Research, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, and IISE Transactions, among many others. Her research and teaching activities have been funded by multiple government and industry grants. Her early career accomplishments were recognized by NSF CAREER Award in 2001 and IISE Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer Award in 2003. Çetinkaya was named IISE Fellow in 2012 for professional leadership and outstanding contributions to industrial engineering. She is a department editor of IISE Transactions and an associate editor of Naval Research Logistics. Çetinkaya joined SMU in 2014 from TAMU—after 17 years of service—where she was Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and she obtained her Ph.D. in Management Science and Systems in 1996 from McMaster University in Canada.
