[CCoE Notice] Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

[Khator, Suresh]

Dear College of Engineering Faculty:

 

I am sending the following dissertation defense information in case any
of your graduate students or you are interested in attending it.


Suresh Khator

_______________________________________________________

Suresh K. Khator, Ph.D., P.E.                         Phone:
713-743-4205         

Associate Dean, College of Engineering    Fax: 713-743-4214

University of Houston                                     Email:
skhator at uh.edu   

E421 Engineering Bldg 2                                www.egr.uh.edu/ie

Houston, TX 77204-4008

Department of Industrial Engineering

 

Doctoral Dissertation Presentation

 

Topic: Optimal Control Policies for Production/Inventory Systems

With Exchange Transactions

 

Doctoral Candidate: Nilesh Ramesh Kulkarni

 

Advisor: Dr. Ali Ekici

 

Date: April 13th 2010 Tuesday

 

Time: 9:00 am

 

Place: E 214, Engineering Building 2

 

Abstract

 

Today's firms face unprecedented challenges due to increasing production
variability, upstream supply disruptions, demand volatility, and recent
surges in the transportation costs. Transshipments among firms supplying
substitutable products can mitigate the impacts of uncertainty and
enhance the overall supply chain efficiency. High-volume, two-way
systematic transshipments, known as exchanges, are common in gas and
chemical industries.  In this work, we consider a two location system
where systematic exchange transactions are controlled by a central
agent. We model the system as a finite-horizon expected total cost
dynamic program and an infinite-horizon expected total discounted cost
dynamic program and characterize the optimal production/inventory and
the exchange policies for such system.  We also extend this model to
incorporate Markov-modulated demand where demand can be positively or
negatively correlated. Using extensive numerical analysis, we present
the sensitivity of our results to different factors such as capacity
allocation, demand allocation, exchange transaction costs, exchange
inventory holding costs and the demand volatility and provide managerial
insights on the desirability of exchange transactions. Additionally, we
introduce the generalized framework for transshipment systems, which
accounts for traditional transshipment related costs, exchange
transactions related costs and fixed costs for initiating
transshipments. Finally, we summarize our findings and present several
future research directions that can follow this work. 

 

Keywords: Exchange transactions, transshipments, inventory management,
make-to-stock system, Markov Decision Process.

 

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