Production, Service Systems & Distribution Systems

Today’s competitive global marketplace is full of opportunities as well as new and formidable challenges. The modern enterprise needs to combine the advantages of lean manufacturing (low inventories, homogenous and stable cellular production technology) with the advantages of agile manufacturing (adaptivity to stochastic market and production dynamics).

To achieve critically needed productivity gains, tractable modeling and optimization of the complex stochastic dynamics of production systems and supply chains is of paramount importance. We synthesize mainstream management science methodologies (operations research and logistics) with control theory and applied probability approaches to address the new challenges of today’s marketplace.

Our approach:

New results in information system architectures allow us to achieve efficientdecomposition of complex stochastic dynamic systems based on the recognition and classification of sub-system dynamics characterized by distinguishable time scales. Our approach enables the coordination of decentralized and hence tractable subsystems without sacrificing optimality. The synthesis of control theory, mathematical programming, and stochastic systems disciplines has allowed us to explore, until recently, virgin territory.

Significant contributions have been achieved amongst others in hybrid control, stochastic scheduling and manufacturing flow control, rapid learning and sensitivity analysis, dynamic lead time production planning, supply chain inventory control under uncertain auto-correlated production and demand conditions, and dynamic resource allocation