Flexibility, Adaptability and Pareto Efficiency in Manufacturing Operations

Friday, November 17, 2017 - 12:00
427 Thackeray Hall
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Abstract or Additional Information

Abstract: Process and operational flexibility have been widely applied in many industries as competitive strategies to improve responsiveness to demand uncertainty. 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.