【Academic Seminar】Online Demand Fulfillment under Limited Flexibility

Topic： Online Demand Fulfillment under Limited Flexibility

Speaker: Hailun Zhang, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Date and Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm, March 7, 2019

Venue: Boardroom, Dao Yuan Building

Abstract：

We study online demand fulfillment in sparse networks with arbitrary numbers of resources and request types, and positive Generalized Chaining Gaps (GCG) introduced by Shi et al. (2018). We show that such a sparse network with limited flexibility is both necessary and sufficient to achieve bounded performance gap compared with networks with full flexibility, extending the work by Asadpour et al. (2018) from the long chains to more general sparse networks. We develop simple inventory allocation rules and guidelines for designing sparse network structures with positive GCGs such as generalized long chains. Numerical experiments and a real case study are conducted to confirm our findings as well as some of the flexibility principles conjectured in the literature.

Biography：

Dr. Hailun Zhang is a Postdoc fellow in Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics at HKUST, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in July 2018. His research interests lie in data-driven queuing networks, online algorithm design and applications. Before HKUST, he received his bachelor and master's degree in Mathematics department from Peking University. He is from Hubei, China.