CAREER: Designing Integrated Supply Chain Systems and Practical Market Mechanisms

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)proposes to fund the development of tools, algorithms, and systems that address the integrated supply chain design and management problem and the efficient market design problem. There are three major components in this development. The first one focuses on the strategic supply chain design models, in which results and insights from inventory theory will be incorporated into the location models. Once the supply chain configuration is established, the second component emphasizes the better management of supply chain inventory. The objective at this stage is to minimize the total shipment and inventory holding costs, which can be achieved by coordinating the inventory replenishment strategy with the shipment plan that exploits the quantity discount effect. Finally, in order to reach system-wide efficiency, market mechanisms will be developed that can provide both buyers and sellers with enough incentives to participate in the market and to achieve efficient resource allocation. This research will be fully integrated with the educational program through the participation of both graduate and undergraduate students. One primary goal is to stimulate undergraduate students' interest in advanced graduate study by involving them in the proposed research efforts. If successful, the results of this research can help companies design reliable and efficient supply chains, better manage their inventories to achieve very high customer satisfaction at minimum costs, and further increase their profits by providing a fair and efficient market environment. It will also contribute to our understanding of market mechanism design under real supply chain settings, which constitutes a major step towards the development of the knowledgebase on the important interfaces between supply chain management and market design.