Time：15:30-17:00 March 25, 2016 Friday

Venue：1004

Speaker：Jiheng Zhang, Associate Professor, Hongkong University of Science and Technology 

Host：Qingwei Jin, Associate Professor, SOM, Zhejiang University

Title：Asymptotic Optimal Control of Perishable Inventory

Summary：

Westudy joint replenishment and clearance of perishable products when the demandrate is large. We propose two policies based on fluid and diffusion approximations, respectively. The fluid based policy can achieve asymptoticoptimality with the gap explicitly computed. The diffusion based policy can significantly improve the gap when the initial inventory is small. When the initial inventory is large, we propose an algorithm, which is much simpler than the original dynamic programming, to achieve asymptotic optimality with the improved gap. Numerical experiments show that our proposed policy works well comparing to the true optimal policy by solving the stochastic dynamic programming.

About the Speaker：

Jiheng Zhang is currently an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests are applied probability, stochastic modeling and optimization, data analysis, numerical methods and algorithm; with applications in service operations management, large communication networks, healthcare. He received both Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in operations research from Georgia Institute of Technology (2009, 2005). His works have been published in journals such as Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research and Annals of Applied Probability.