Inventories with Multiple Supply and Demand Sources and Networks of Queues with Overflow Bypasses

INFORMATION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT - MARSHALL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS PRESENTSDr. Jeannette SongProfessor of Operations Management, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University"Inventories with Multiple Supply and Demand Sources and Networks of Queues with Overflow Bypasses"Abstract: Consider an inventory system with multiple supply sources.
The replenishment leadtimes from each source are stochastic, representing congestion and disruption. We develop performance evaluation tools for a family of reasonable order policies. These policies take into account real-time supply information, which can be obtained through tracking technologies such as GPS and RFID.Performance evaluation of such state-dependent policies is generally hard. The main thrust of the paper is to show that, under these policies, the supply system becomes a network of queues with special routing mechanism called an overflow bypass. The solution has a simple product form. Thus, we obtain closed-form performance measures. These results reinterpret and extend Moinzadeh and Schmidt's analysis of a system with two sources having deterministic leadtimes. We further extend the analysis to batch ordering policies and multiple demand classes.Friday, November 9, 2007, Hoffman Hall 418, 10:30 - 12:00 PM________________________________________________________________________Professor Song received a B.S. degree in Mathematics from Beijing Normal University, a M.S. degree in Operations Research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Ph.D. in Management Science & Operations Management from Columbia University. Before joining Duke University, she served on the faculties of University California, Irvine and Columbia University, and held a visiting position at the University of California, Berkeley.
She also worked as a research fellow in the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Location: H. Leslie Hoffman Hall Of Business Administration (HOH) - 418

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