Neural Coordination and Capacity Control for Inventory Management

C Eisenach, U Ghai, D Madeka, K Torkkola, D Foster, S Kakade, Neural Coordination and Capacity Control for Inventory Management, 2024, arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02817. (SCOT, Amazon)

Some information and papers related to the seminar

(10/23/2024) 洪一薰教授 (Prof. I-Hsuan Hong) 

• Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. J. Nalebuff,  The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. (思辨賽局)

Optimization Automates Emergency Department Nurse Scheduling at Hartford Hospital

Liangyuan Na, Jean Pauphilet, Ali Haddad-Sisakht, Louis Raison, Audrey Silver, Patricia Veronneau, Nicole Vogt, Dimitris Bertsimas (2024) Optimization Automates Emergency Department Nurse Scheduling at Hartford Hospital. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.

Business Analytics Laboratory (商業分析實驗室)

If you are interested in operations research, machine learning, data science, and its real-world applications (in supply chain, business, smart manufacturing, etc.), please email me your resume and transcript to schedule a meeting or online chat. Please refer to this blog for more details about your resume. (Guides for students,  paper presentation in the group meeting)

Guides for students in Business Analytics Laboratory (商業分析實驗室學生指引)

Knowledge to master for a better foundation (and future)

Tools and general: 

• 李琳山老師，碩博士生應該要知道的事情  (YouTube)

上課內容 (Teaching)

許志華，中原大學，電機資訊學院，工業與系統工程學系

• The best way to contact me (email):  chhsu135 AT gmail DOT com (主旨：修課名稱和班級，學號，姓名) 

• 辦公室 (My office)：(工業系館) 莊敬大樓 (Building no. 23 for ISE) 201-3，電話 (phone)  03 265 4427。辦公室時間，三 4:10 - 5:50 pm，四 3:10 - 4 pm (歡迎使用 Microsoft team)。導生 (分組登記)。FB。

• 商業分析實驗室 (Business Analytics Laboratory): Guides for students, Paper presentation。 

• 專題和論文的製作與報告 (tips for the final project and your thesis)，翻轉教室 (Flipped classroom)。作業研究：到高中的介紹 (提問)。

• Please use the school's MS team account for online sessions. 
• Login Account: 學號@o365st.cycu.edu.tw, student_ID@o365st.cycu.edu.tw
• Please use browser-based login instead of the application program to avoid login problems.

• 2024 秋 (Fall) 
• Please be considerate/polite, and show up only during the office hours of a course. The students in the lab need quiet time for their studies and research.
• Email: 
• If you have further questions, please ask the TA. (cc (副本) teacher: chhsu135 at Gmail)
• TA will handle your questions or concerns. 
• TA will discuss with me if she/he cannot resolve the issues.

• 作業研究 (上)，工業三丙
• 登記，課前預習和每週進度
• 助教：朱旻為 (Willy) (email: homework7915 at gmail)
• 辦公室時間：莊敬202-1，(三) 4:10 ~ 5 pm
• 機器學習，工業三 
• 登記，課前預習和每週進度 
• 助教趙振宇 (Jeff) (email: zz2347605 at gmail)
• 莊敬 202-1，辦公室時間 (二) 6 - 7 pm
• 書報討論 (Seminar)，碩博班 (graduate students) 
• 助教朱品穎 (Pollie) (email: a0973634180 at gmail)
• Some information and papers related to the seminar

• 課程組員互評表 (Evaluation form for team members)
• Deadline: the day for the last class meeting time
• Default: If no one answers, everyone will get the same score for project participation.  If only 1 person fills in the form, we will use that as the group score for project participation.

服務和計畫 (Service and projects)

產學合作 (Industry-Academia Cooperation)

• 金屬工業研究發展中心 (Metal Industries Research & Development Centre)，最佳化決策於工站排程應用之研究 (Optimal decision-making in work station scheduling) (3)，主持人 (PI)，2024

Amazon Locker Capacity Management

Samyukta Sethuraman, Ankur Bansal, Setareh Mardan, Mauricio G. C. Resende, Timothy L. Jacobs (2024) Amazon Locker Capacity Management. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.

專題和論文的製作與報告 (tips for the final project and your thesis)

• (at the bottom) Avoid common phenomena, final written report (for your ppt content)
• (大學生) 重要任務

• 人生困境：

• 計算機程式補考後的人生 (1/2) 

• 我的方法：運動，音樂 (馬友友)，閱讀 (哲學，堅忍的挑戰，老莊)

• Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, McGraw Hill, 2007. (譚家瑜譯，更快樂：哈佛最受歡迎的一堂課，天下雜誌，2012)

Fluid Approximations for Revenue Management

When one encounters a stochastic optimization/control problem, one popular approach is to transform it into a deterministic problem by fluid approximation. The following highly-cited classic papers illustrate the applications of this approach:   

預備研究生 (4 + 1) (包含資料科學相關研究所和職涯準備)

預備研究生規定 (資訊處，新增加同學的問題)

• 培養
• 商業分析實驗室 (Business Analytics Laboratory)：論文。
• 人少，老師 (每週) 單獨討論。可於辦公室時間詢問庭煜。
• 學生的光，老師看得見。

Customer Choice Models vs. Machine Learning

Jacob Feldman, Dennis J. Zhang, Xiaofei Liu, and Nannan Zhang (2021) Customer Choice Models vs. Machine Learning: Finding Optimal Product Displays on Alibaba. Operations Research 70(1):309-328. (Best OM Paper in Operations Research Award: Finalist, pdf, implementation details)

2023 Franz Edelman Award

2023 Edelman Competition (video)

Prakhar Mehrotra et al., (2024) Optimizing Walmart’s Supply Chain from Strategy to Execution. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics 54(1):5-19. (2023 Franz Edelman Award) (Keywords: supply chain optimization, network design,  simulation,  truck routing and loading, mixed-integer programming,  metaheuristics)

到高中介紹作業研究

臺北市立陽明高級中學，作業研究，2023/11/30。

適性教育、AI 和作業研究，2024/2/22。(給問問題的女同學：如果二三類組都有興趣，可以修輔系或雙主修，請參考 37 頁的內容。可以看一下台灣大的產業類別：0050，0051。當然，也可以新創事業，但是，要有心理準備，這是一條非常不容易的路。黃仁勳談創業必備超能力驚吐「若回到30歲」：不會創業)

作業研究 (含最佳化) 的應用

為了提高同學們的學習動機，提供以下相關的資訊，以幫助同學們找到方向。也和暑期實習和未來就業中，決策支援系統中的演算法有密切關聯。以下許多的內容屬於碩博士階段的課程，也可以增加同學們就讀研究所的動機：

• Journals: 
• INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics
• INFORMS is the leading international association for Operations Research & Analytics professionals.
• The mission of INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics is to publish manuscripts focusing on the practice of operations research and management science and the impact this practice has on organizations throughout the world. 
• Good topics to be explored for the final project
• Ramayya Krishnan and Pascal Van Hentenryck, editors, Advances in Integrating AI & O.R., INFORMS EC2021, Volume 16, April 19, 2021.

Worst and best scenarios of operations research application (作業研究應用的最差和最佳場景)

During the final hour of this semester, I said that "to many people, operations research is only a required course to graduate." That is the worst scenario of a course or a degree. 

I will provide the positive scenarios if you master the concept of operations research. 

Minimizing Multimodular Functions and Allocating Capacity in Bike-Sharing Systems

Daniel Freund, Shane G. Henderson, David B. Shmoys (2022) Minimizing Multimodular Functions and Allocating Capacity in Bike-Sharing Systems. Operations Research 70(5):2715-2731. (Best OM Paper in Operations Research Award, arXiv)

Interesting, Important, and Impactful Operations Management

Gerard P. Cachon, Karan Girotra, Serguei Netessine (2020) Interesting, Important, and Impactful Operations Management. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 22(1):214-222. 

Learning an Inventory Control Policy with General Inventory Arrival Dynamics

S Andaz, C Eisenach, D Madeka, K Torkkola, R Jia, D Foster, S Kakade, Learning an Inventory Control Policy with General Inventory Arrival Dynamics, 2023, arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.17168. (Amazon)

In this paper we address the problem of learning and backtesting inventory control policies in the presence of general arrival dynamics -- which we term as a quantity-over-time arrivals model (QOT). We also allow for order quantities to be modified as a post-processing step to meet vendor constraints such as order minimum and batch size constraints -- a common practice in real supply chains. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work to handle either arbitrary arrival dynamics or an arbitrary downstream post-processing of order quantities. Building upon recent work (Madeka et al., 2022) we similarly formulate the periodic review inventory control problem as an exogenous decision process, where most of the state is outside the control of the agent. Madeka et al. (2022) show how to construct a simulator that replays historic data to solve this class of problem. In our case, we incorporate a deep generative model for the arrivals process as part of the history replay. By formulating the problem as an exogenous decision process, we can apply results from Madeka et al. (2022) to obtain a reduction to supervised learning. Finally, we show via simulation studies that this approach yields statistically significant improvements in profitability over production baselines. Using data from an ongoing real-world A/B test, we show that Gen-QOT generalizes well to off-policy data.

Queueing Theory: Classical and Modern Methods

Dimitris Bertsimas and David Gamarnik, Queueing Theory: Classical and Modern Methods, ‎Dynamic Ideas, 2022.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK:

• Part I describes single and multi-server queues.
• Part II treats single and multiclass queueing networks (MQNETs).
• Part III introduces asymptotic methods, including queueing networks in heavy traffic, large deviations, call centers, queues in space, and the supermarket model.
• Part IV outlines the use of optimization in queueing networks.
• Part V presents Markov chains and processes, Brownian motion, and weak convergence in the Appendix.