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****************************  Special Date *****************************

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                                                           Seminar

             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

                                 The Chinese University of Hong Kong

 

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Title:  Decentralized Demand Management in Logistics Systems and

         Supply Chains

 

Speaker:  Ms. Ozgun Caliskan Demirag

                H. Milton Stewart  School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

                Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Date     :   December 15th, 2006 (Friday)

Time    :   2:30p.m. - 3:30p.m.

Venue  :   Room 513

                MMW Engineering Building(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

                CUHK

 

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Abstract:

 

We analyze problems arising in the management of decentralized systems in two

application areas: sea cargo booking and automotive sales.

 

In the first part, we study a decentralized booking system where central

headquarters determines aggregate capacity for geographically-dispersed

agents who manage cargo bookings. We model agents' behavior with

network flow models and build these into an overall model to optimize

the capacities allocated to the agents. For the special case of a single route,

the optimal behavior of agents facilitates a mixed integer programming

formulation for the problem. For the NP-hard multiple route case, we analyze

several heuristics for the decentralized system that incorporate agent behavior.

We show that a decentralized system may perform arbitrarily worse than the

centralized system, although the choice of sales incentive may impact the

performance. We develop an upper bound that gives further insight on the

performance of the decentralized system, and we use numerical experiments

to test the heuristics.

 

In the second part, we analyze promotions in the automotive industry

where decentralization occurs as a result of the non-direct distribution

and sales channels of the car manufacturers. We study a game theoretical

model to examine the impact of ¡°retailer incentive¡± and ¡°customer rebate¡±

promotions on the manufacturer's pricing and the retailer's ordering/sales

decisions. We consider several models with different demand

characteristics and information asymmetry between the manufacturer and

a price discriminating retailer, and we determine which promotion would

benefit the manufacturer under which market conditions. We extend this

research by introducing competition among the manufacturers and retailers.

We provide several insights through numerical examples.

 

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Biography:

 

Ozgun Caliskan Demirag is a Ph.D. candidate in the H. Milton Stewart School

of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Her research interests include supply chain management, logistics, and

operations-marketing interface. She received her Bachelor¡¯s degree in

Industrial Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, in 2001,

and her Master¡¯s degrees in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering

from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005.

 

***********************  ALL ARE WELCOME  ************************

 

Host  :      Professor Li, Duan

Tel    :      (852) 2609-8323

Email :     dli@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

Enquiries: Peixiang Zhao or Jeffrey Xu Yu,

                 Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

                 CUHK

Website:   http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810

Email:       seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk

 

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