CAREER: Manufacturing Flexibility through Demand Chain Management

拟议研究的目标是制定和分析可实施的政策，将工具与需求管理联系起来（例如，定价或交货期）与生产过程。 重点是具有交货期灵活性的制造业或具有价格或属性可替代的产品的制造业（例如，汽车）。 具体的研究活动包括：确定报价提前期和动态分配能力的机制，以服务差异化的客户类别;制定生产和定价决策，将产品的价格或属性的可替代性;创建组件的动态分配到产品;并分析和纳入消费者的战略行为，如在定价和生产决策的远期购买。 解决这些问题的方法包括数学技术，如非线性和动态规划，离散选择和博弈论，以及统计方法。 该补助金资助的教育活动的主要目标是提高工业工程本科生对道德困境的认识和推理。 这将通过制定新的课程单元来实现，并将评估新的教学法，以确定学生的道德推理是否有显著提高。拟议的研究将产生用于制造的决策工具，例如将供需联系起来并明确考虑客户行为的算法或结构决策政策。 改进的决策将带来更好的客户服务（以按时履行订单的能力衡量），并可能带来其他好处，如减少库存和减少整体产品交付周期。 改善供需之间的匹配也可以更有效地利用劳动力或生产能力等稀缺资源。 拟议决策的好处和生产过程中额外灵活性的价值将使用工业合作者的数据进行量化。 拟议的伦理活动将最直接地指导一个工业工程系的课程决策的变化，但结果也将对其他工程学科以及其他大学产生影响。

The objective of the proposed research is to develop and analyze implementable policies that link tools to manage demand (e.g., pricing or leadtime) with production processes. The focus is on manufacturing industries with leadtime flexibility or with products that may be substitutable by price or attribute (e.g., cars). Specific research activities include: determining mechanisms for quoting leadtimes and dynamically allocating capacity to service-differentiated customer classes; developing production and pricing decisions that incorporate product substitutability by price or attribute; creating dynamic allocations of components to products; and analyzing and incorporating strategic behaviors of consumers such as forward buying in pricing and production decisions. The methodologies to solve these problems comprise mathematical techniques such as nonlinear and dynamic programming, discrete choice and game theory, and statistical methodologies. The primary objective of the educational activities funded by the grant is to increase the awareness and reasoning in ethical dilemmas within Industrial Engineering undergraduate students. This will be achieved through the development of new modules for the curriculum, and the new pedagogy will be assessed to see if students' ethical reasoning has increased significantly. The proposed research will result in decision-making tools for manufacturing such as algorithms or structural decision policies that link supply and demand and explicitly account for customer behavior. The improved decisions will lead to better customer service (measured by the ability to fulfill orders on-time) and could have additional benefits such as reduction of inventory and reduction of overall product leadtime. Improving the match between supply and demand also enables more effective use of scarce resources such as labor or production capacity. The benefits of the proposed decisions and the value of additional flexibility in the production process will be quantified using data from industrial collaborators. The proposed activities in ethics will most immediately guide changes in the curriculum decisions of one Industrial Engineering department, but the results will also have implications for other engineering disciplines as well as other universities.