Fwd: Workshop in Operations Management

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is an announcement of a GSB talk, which might be of interest to some
of you.

Margaret Jaffey
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>Subject: Workshop in Operations Management
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>
>
>     Speaker: Dan Adelman
>       Title: Price-Directed Replenishment of Subsets
>Organization: University of Chicago
>        Date: 5 October 2000
>        Time: 11:00 AM  (Note slightly different time)
>       Place: Stuart 216
>
>Abstract:
>The idea of price-directed control is to use an operating policy that
>exploits optimal dual prices from a mathematical programming relaxation of
>the underlying control problem.  We apply it to the problem of
>replenishing inventory to subsets of items (or customers), such as in the
>distribution of industrial gases, so as to minimize the long-run time
>average replenishment cost.
>
>Using marginal values set by management for each item, the dispatcher
>compares the total value of each possible replenishment with its cost, and
>chooses ones that maximize the surplus. We derive this operating policy
>using a linear functional appoximation to the optimal value function of a
>semi-markov decision process.  We also derive a math program whose optimal
>dual prices yield values and whose objective function gives a lower bound
>on system performance.  We use duality theory to show that optimal prices
>satisfy several intuitive properties.  The resulting price-directed policy
>is scalable and achieves optimal or near-optimal performance on many
>problem instances.
>
>
>Future talks:
>
>     Speaker: Will Zangwil
>       Title: E-Commerce
>Organization: University of Chicago
>        Date: 12 October
>
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Margaret P. Jaffey			margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)		(773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago		http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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