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，将管理需求（例如，定价或交货时间）的工具与生产过程联系起来。重点是生产周期灵活的制造业，或者价格或属性可替代的产品（如汽车）。具体的研究活动包括：确定报价交货期的机制和动态分配能力，以服务差异化的客户类别；制定生产和定价决策，纳入产品可替代性的价格或属性；创建组件到产品的动态分配；在定价和生产决策中分析和整合消费者的战略行为，如远期购买。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。由拨款资助的教育活动的主要目标是提高工业工程本科学生对道德困境的认识和推理。这将通过开发新的课程模块来实现，新的教学方法将被评估，看看学生的道德推理是否有明显的提高。拟议的研究将为制造业提供决策工具，如算法或结构决策政策，将供需联系起来，并明确考虑客户行为。改进后的决策将带来更好的客户服务（通过按时完成订单的能力来衡量），并可能带来额外的好处，例如减少库存和减少整体产品交付时间。改善供需匹配还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来自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定的变化，但其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.