Session E02: Operations and Supply Chain Management

 
Date: 11 May 2016
Time: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Venue: R1109, R Core (Shirley Chan Building), PolyU
 
 
Session Chairs: Dr C.T. Daniel Ng and Dr Yulan Wang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
 
This session comprises three studies to address various issues related to operations and supply chain.
  • The Belt and Road Initiative is a call of China for new modes of regional economic cooperation under the trend of development of economic globalization. To promoting the effective implementation of the "The Belt and Road" initiative, it is important to make an optimal or effective investment distribution under such an environment. The first study considers two scenarios for an investment-income system with multi-layer decisions on investment distribution: (1) an optimal investment-distribution policy to maximize the expected income in one region with a group of projects, and (2) a balanced allocation policy which may be applied for an environment with various integrated development levels.

  • From the perspective of a manufacturer, the second study investigates how to design a supply chain structure to maximize his profit when the customers are pursuing fairness and disliking inequality. The authors study this issue in a modified newsvendor framework. Therein, the procurement cost is endogenized and directly affects consumers' fairness perception and willingness to pay for the product. The findings suggest that the manufacturer may intentionally extend his supply chain line, which sharply contrasts common intuition. This equilibrium outcome occurs when customers particularly care about fairness in transactions.

  • The third study considers a k-facility connection problem (k-FCP), which is a generalization of both the k-median Steiner forest problem and the uncapacitated facility connection problem. The authors provide the first approximation algorithm for the k-FCP with an approximation ratio of 2-1/|J|, where |J| is the number of clients. One interesting point regarding this ratio is that both the k-FCP, the general case, and the k-median Steiner forest problem, one of its special cases, share the same best known approximation ratio. This is seldom achieved on its nature counterpart of location problem, i.e., the k-facility location problem and its special case - the k-median problem. The authors also conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of the approximation algorithm.
Title Author(s)
Regional Investment Distribution under “The Belt and Road” Environment Qing Ding and Yinmin Sun (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
Title: Interplay between Customers’ Fairness Seeking Behavior and Supply Chain Format Yun Liu, Ying-Ju Chen (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yulan Wang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Zelong Yi (Shenzhen University)
Title: The k-facility connection problem Xiaofan Lai, Xiangtong Qi (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Zhou Xu (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
 
 
Copyright © 2016 Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. All rights reserved.