Fall 2002

ME/IE 8773-8774

Designing Robust and Reliable Supply Chains

by

Mark S. Daskin
Professor
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208

Wednesday, November 06, 2002
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Room 108 ME
Broadcast on UNITE Channel A
Coffee and cookies will be available in 125 ME following the seminar

This talk will summarize recent work that we have been doing on the design of robust and reliable supply chains. We consider a supply chain to be robust if it can perform well with respect to a range of uncertain future conditions. We have extended a recently developed integrated location/inventory model to account for multiple future scenarios. Both the basic location/inventory model and its multi-scenario extensions will be outlined and computational results will be presented. We consider a supply chain to be reliable if it can continue to perform relatively well even if parts of the supply chain fail. Failures can occur for any one of a number of reasons including business failures, strikes, natural disasters, and terrorist incidents. Initial work on a reliability version of the classical p-median model will be outlined and preliminary computational results will be presented. Throughout the talk, practical problems that motivated the work will be discussed.

Mark S. Daskin received his Ph.D. from the Civil Engineering Department at M.I.T. in 1978. He also holds a B.S.C.E. degree from that department and a Certificate of Post-Graduate Study in Engineering from Cambridge University in England. He is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He has a part-time appointment in the UniversityÕs Transportation Center. From 1995 until 2001, he served as the chair of the IE/MS department. Before joining the Northwestern faculty in 1980, he served on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. Professor DaskinÕs research focuses on the application and development of operations research techniques for the analysis of transportation, logistics, and manufacturing problems. He is the author of over 40 refereed publications in such journals as Transportation Science, Operations Research, Transportation Research, The Logistics and Transportation Review, and the Transportation Research Record. In addition, he is the author of a text entitled, Network and Discrete Location: Models, Algorithms, and Applications (John Wiley, 1995). Professor Daskin is the recipient of a number of awards including Institute of Industrial Engineers Technical Innovation Award (2001), the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984) and a Fulbright Research Award (1989). He is the editor-in-chief of IIE Transactions, serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is the immediate past editor-in-chief of Transportation Science.

Informal Faculty Luncheon: Wednesday, November 06, 2002, 12:00 noon. Meet in 1100 ME and go with other faculty to lunch. Prof. Daskin will be able to attend.