Title

:

On Managing Multiechelon Systems under Stock Disposal

Speaker

:

Prof. Alexandar Angelus

Date

:

April 28th, 2008 (Monday)

Time

:

4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Venue

:

Room 513

William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

CUHK

We consider a nonstationary multiechelon inventory system
under stochastic demand in which disposals of excess stock are allowed
at each echelon. We characterize the optimal policy, which represents a
novel form of the echelon basestock policy (referred to as the nested,
bottom-up, echelon policy). The critical numbers depend on the initial
state of the system. We find that under certain ordering restrictions on
model parameters additional properties of the optimal policy emerge,
which lend themselves to direct managerial interpretation and useful
guidelines regarding model implementation in practice. We propose
a heuristic and use it to illustrate the results and show how disposals
of excess stock may evolve over time.

Alexandar Angelus is an Associate Professor of
Operations Management at SMU. His research areas include inventory
theory, stochastic assembly systems, dynamic programming and capacity
management. He has published in Management Science and Operations
Research, where he has also served as a frequent reviewer. Prior to
coming to SMU in January of 2008, he taught at the Haas School of Business
at UC Berkeley. Following his PhD from the Graduate School of Business
at Stanford, Dr. Angelus worked in industry as a management consultant
in the area of operations strategy and supply chain management. During
his industry career, he came across a number of interesting and mostly
unexplored operations management issues, one of which is addressed in
this work.

Host

:

Prof. Zhou, Xiang, Sean

Tel

:

(852) 2609-8336

Email

:

zhoux@se.cuhk.edu.hk

Enquiries

:

Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810

Email

:

seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk