主 题：Process Flexibility: A Distribution-Free Bound on the Performance of K-Chain主讲人：美国纽约大学Stern商学院 张家伟副教授
主持人：工商管理学院 田俊峰副教授
时 间：2013年11月5日（周二）上午10:00
地 点：柳林校区通博楼A409会议室
主办单位：工商管理学院 科研处
主讲人简介：
张家伟，美国纽约大学Stern商学院运营管理副教授（终身职位），Harold MacDowell Faculty Fellow，清华大学应用数学学士、运筹学硕士，斯坦福大学运筹学博士，目前研究兴趣为数学规划及其在运营管理中的应用。2004年获得INFORMS优化领域的青年学者奖，国际权威期刊Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research的副主编（Associate Editor）。近几年多篇高水平论文发表在Operations Research、Mathematics of Operations Research、Manufacturing and Service Operations Management、INFORMS Journal on Computing、Naval Research Logistics等期刊。
内容提要:
Process flexibility has been widely applied in many industries as a competitive strategy to improve responsiveness to demand uncertainty. An important flexibility concept is the long chain proposed by Jordan and Graves. The effectiveness of the long chain has been investigated via numerical as well as theoretical analysis for specific probability distributions of the random demand. In this paper, we obtain in closed-form a distribution-free bound on the ratio of the expected sale of the long chain relative to that of full flexibility. Our bound depends only on the mean and standard deviation of the random demand, but compares very well with the bound that uses complete information of the demand distribution. This suggests the robustness of the performance of the long chain under different distributions. We also prove a similar result for k-chain, a more general flexibility structure. (Joint work with Xuan Wang, a PhD student at NYU Stern.)
