管理科学系学术讲座

时间：2024年9月10日（周二）15:30-17:00

地点：管理学院思源楼524室

主题：Revisiting Supply Chain Coordination: Tackling Unknown Demand in Multi-Echelon Systems with Online Learning

主讲人：Shi Chen （陈实，华盛顿大学）

Marion B. Ingersoll Professor

Associate Professor of Operations Management

University of Washington

主持人：吴肖乐复旦大学管理学院教授

摘要：

The multi-echelon inventory models with known demand distributions have been essential in shaping supply chain management strategies, particularly in optimizing centralized supply chains (the “first-best” policy) and designing contracts that encourage decentralized supply chains to align with the first-best policy (“supply chain coordination”). This work extends the classic multi-echelon inventory model to an online setting with an unknown demand distribution, re-examining optimal inventory control and coordination strategies. Our algorithm for the centralized system ensures convergence to the first-best policy with low regret for expected losses. For decentralized systems, achieving the first-best policy requires operating under a coordinating contract mechanism with unknown parameters. We address this new challenge by proposing a contract-making protocol that ensures independent firms learn the optimal contract parameters, incentivizing them to adopt the first-best policy and minimizing overall loss regret. Empirical results confirm the superiority of our algorithms over standard benchmarks such as explore-then-exploit and online gradient descent.

简介：

Shi Chen is the Marion B. Ingersoll Professor and an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a B.E. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Dr. Chen’s research interests encompass supply chain and inventory management, social responsibility and sustainability, as well as innovative business models, including operations management for the cloud computing and renewable energy industries. He serves as a senior editor for the POM journal and as an associate editor for the MSOM journal.