SGER: Forecast-Robust Capacity Acquisition and Subcontracting Methods

这项探索性研究小额赠款（SGER）为开发预测能力获取和生产计划分包决策的方法提供了资金。在有限的计划范围内获得能力、持有库存和将订单分包给第三方供应商之间的战略权衡将被审查以解决生产计划问题。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结构；(2)研究需求预测误差下最优解和近似解的鲁棒性；(3)开发有效的方法，生成对需求预测误差相对不敏感的解。将描述适合于能力获取、生产、分包和库存持有决策的不同类型的成本结构。所开发方法的计算复杂度将针对不同的子类进行研究。将进行广泛的计算实验，以测试分析结果在改进容量获取和分包决策方面的有效性。通过从本研究中获得的见解，我们将在多级供应商-客户供应链中研究预测稳健能力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对其供应商的需求具有涓滴效应，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至关重要。本研究对预测稳健的产能收购和分包决策的战略权衡提供了分析见解，特别是在服务行业和产品寿命较短的高科技行业。

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, (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 andsubcontracting decisions, especially in service industry and high-tech industries with short product life span.