Event Details

Professor Fikri Karaesmen from Koc University, Turkey will present a seminar to the Management Science Department

Abstract: We consider a class of production/inventory flow control models represented by make-to-stock queues. Dynamic production and inventory allocation problems for these models are complicated in multi-dimensional state spaces. Uncovering the structure of the optimal or nearly-optimal allocation policy is also not trivial. However, it turns out that restless bandit indices are computable relatively easily for a number of problems within this class. We demonstrate that these restless bandit indices can play a major role in understanding the intuition behind good policy structures. Indeed, in some cases, index-based policies coincide with exact optimal policies. This motivates us to build scalable approximation policies for multi dimensional models based on easily computable indices.