Prof. Yehua Wei
Assistant Professor, Boston College
Talk:
Process Flexibility for Multi-Period Production Systems
Abstract:
In this talk, I will present some new theories we developed for process flexibility in a multi-period make-to-order production (MTO) system. First, we propose and formalize a notion of ``effective chaining" termed the Generalized Chaining Gap (GCG), which can be viewed as a natural extension of classical chaining idea from the process flexibility literature. Using the GCG, we prove that in a general system with high utilization rate, one only need a sparse flexibility structure with m+n arcs to achieve similar performance as full flexibility, where m and n are equal to the number of plants and products in the system. We also provide a simple and efficient algorithm for finding such sparse structures. Moreover, we show that the requirement of m+n arcs is necessary, as for some systems, even the best flexibility structure with m+n-1 arcs cannot achieve the same asymptotic performance as full flexibility. By combining key ideas from the areas of operations management, queueing theory and network flows, our analysis make progress towards the better understanding of the key design principles of process flexibility structures in a multi-period environment, a topic of which has been limited due to the complexity of dynamic optimization.
This is joint work with Cong Shi and Yuan Zhong.
Biography:
Yehua Wei is currently an Assistant Professor in the Operations Management Department at Boston College. He has received his PhD in Operations Research from MIT in 2013, and prior to Boston College, he was an Assistant Professor in the Decision Sciences area at Duke University. His research interest includes designing sparse resource pooling systems, supply chain risk mitigation, and strategic customers in queueing networks. His research has won a number of awards, including 2nd place of the 2011 George Nicholson Paper Competition, 2nd place of the 2013 CSAMSE Best Paper Competition, and the 2014 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. Recently, his paper co-authored with Alessandro Arlotto and Andrew Frazelle, was selected as a finalist of the 2016 MSOM student paper competition.
