ABSTRACT:

Process flexibility has been widely applied in many industries as a competitive strategy to improve responsiveness to demand uncertainty. In their seminal work, Jordan and Graves proposed an important flexibility concept, called the long chain design, and studied its empirical performance. In this talk, we summarize recent theoretical developments in understanding the effectiveness of the long chain design as well as other sparse flexibility structures. 

Bio:

Jiawei Zhang is Professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences and Harold MacDowell Faculty Fellow at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and a B.S. degree and an M.S. degree from Tsinghua University.  Professor Zhang's research interests include business analytics and optimization. His work has appeared in Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations, Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research, Operations Research, SIAM Journal on Computing, etc. Professor Zhang was a recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers in 2004. He currently serves as Associate Editor for several journals including Operations Research (2006-), Mathematics of Operations Research (2009-), and Management Science (2014-).