SGER: Worker Assignment for Cellular Manufacturing Considering Human Issues

这一小笔探索性研究补助金(SGER)为制定预测方法提供资金--生产计划中稳健的产能获取和分包决策。对于生产计划问题，将研究在有限计划范围内获得产能、持有库存和将订单分包给第三方供应商之间的战略权衡。该研究项目有三个主要目标：(1)研究产能获取和分包问题的最优解的结构；(2)研究需求预测误差下最优解和近似解的稳健性；(3)开发有效的方法，产生对需求预测误差相对不敏感的解。将说明适用于能力购置、生产、分包和库存持有决策的不同类型的成本结构。对于不同的子类，将研究所开发方法的计算复杂性。将进行广泛的计算实验，以检验分析结果在改进能力获取和分包决策方面的有效性。根据这项研究所获得的见解，将在多层供应商-客户供应链中调查预测稳健的产能获取和分包决策的下游影响。由于交付最终产品的公司的产能和分包决策会对供应商的需求产生细微的影响，因此研究整个产品供应链的协调决策对于降低产品的总制造成本是至关重要的。这项研究有可能为预测-稳健的产能获取和分包决策中的战略权衡提供分析见解，特别是在产品寿命较短的服务行业和高科技行业。

This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) provides funding for the development of methodologies for making forecast-robust capacity acquisition and subcontracting decisions in production planning. The strategic tradeoffs between acquiring capacity over a finite planning horizon, holding inventories and subcontracting orders to third party vendors will be examined for production planning problems. The research project has three main objectives: (1) investigating the structure of optimal solutions for capacity acquisition and subcontracting problems, (2) studying the robustness of the optimal and approximate solutions under demand forecast errors, and (3) developing efficient methods that will produce solutions that are relatively insensitive to errors in the demand forecasts. Different types of cost structures that are appropriate for capacity acquisition, production, subcontracting and inventory holding decisions will be delineated. The computational complexity of the developed methods will be investigated for various subclasses. Extensive computational experiments will be conducted to test the effectiveness of the analytical results in improving the capacity acquisition and subcontracting decisions. With the insights gained from this research, the downstream impacts of forecast-robust capacity acquisition and subcontracting decisions will be investigated in multi-echelon vendor-customer supply chains. Since the capacity and subcontracting decisions of a firm delivering a final product have a trickling effect on the demand of its vendors, research in coordinated decision making throughout the supply chain of the product is essential in reducing the total manufacturing cost of the product. This research has the potential of providing analytical insights to the strategic tradeoffs in forecast-robust capacity acquisition and subcontracting decisions, especially in service industry and high-tech industries with short product life span.