Events Calendar

Epstein ISE Department Seminar

Speaker: Hoda Bidkhori, Lecturer and Postdoctoral Associate, Operations Research and Statistics Group, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Flexibility, Adaptability and Pareto Efficiency in Manufacturing Operations

Abstract: Process and operational flexibility have been widely applied in many industries as competitive strategies to improve responsiveness to demand uncertainty. The first part of this talk addresses the problem of managing process and operational flexibility in a fairly general manufacturing system. In our model, each plant might have a different cost for adding flexibility or extra capacity, and different costs for transporting its different products. We model this problem as an adaptive optimization problem and discuss different approaches to solve it efficiently. One of the features of our model is that it captures information about the uncertainty in the demand; different demand uncertainties lead to different design suggestions. We conclude this talk with several computational and theoretical results.

In the second part of the talk, we introduce a method for worst-case analysis of stochastic programming for a class of truncated distributions. We use this to evaluate the performance of general unbalanced process flexibility structures.



Biography: Hoda Bidkhori is a lecturer and postdoctoral associate in the Operations Research and Statistics group at MIT's Sloan School of Management. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from MIT. Her current research centers around decision making under uncertainty and the development and implementation of robust and computationally tractable solutions for problems arising in manufacturing and logistics. She is a recipient of the Roger Family Prizes at MIT for excellent mentorship, and Second and Third Prizes in the 8th and 9th International Competition for University Students.


Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

More Information: SEMINAR-Bidkhori.doc

Location: 206

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum