Please welcome Dr. Xuili Chao from the University of Michigan. His topic of discussion is how to deal with the difficulties associated with controlling perishable inventories.
As always refreshments are available in 428 Daniels Hall 30 minutes before the seminar begins.
Perishable inventory control is an important but challenging class of operations optimization problem. Its optimal policy is known to be extremely complex, making it impossible to implement in applications and intractable to compute due to curse of dimensionality. In this talk, I will present a class of very simple and easy-to-compute heuristic policy and show that it is asymptotically optimal when either the lifetime, the demand size, or the shortage penalty cost becomes large, and what’s more, the optimality gap between the performance of this policy and that of the true optimal policy converges to zero exponentially fast. This is a joint work with Jinzhi Bu and Xiting Gong.
Xiuli Chao is a professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining Michigan, he was on the faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State University. His recently research interests include stochastic modeling and analysis, inventory control, game theory, supply chain management, and data-driven optimization. He is the co-author of two books, “Operations Scheduling with Applications in Manufacturing and Services” (Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1998), and “Queueing Networks: Customers, Signals, and Product Form Solutions” (John Wiley & Sons, 1999). Chao received the Erlang Prize from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS in 1998, and the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award from Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) in 2005.
