Managing with Incomplete Inventory Information

题目：Managing with Incomplete Inventory Information

主讲人：Dr. Meng Li

时间: Monday: 2:30pm, Dec. 8th.

地点: 25A3C (25楼A座3层C教室).

Abstract: A critical assumption in the vast literature has been that the current level of inventory is known to the decision maker. Some of the most celebrated results such as the optimality of base-stock policies have been obtained under this assumption. Yet it is often the case in practice that the decision makers have incomplete or partial information about their inventory levels. The reasons for this are many: Inventory records or cash register information differ from actual inventory because of a variety of factors including transaction errors, theft, spoilage, misplacement, unobserved lost demands, and information delays. As a result, what are usually observed are some events or signals, related to the inventory level. These relationships can provide the distribution of current inventorylevels. Therefore, the system state in the inventory control problems is not the current inventory level, but rather its distribution given the observed signals. Thus, the analysis for finding optimal production or ordering policies takes place generally in the space of probability distributions. The purpose of this talk is to discuss inventory management problems with incomplete information.

Bio: Meng Li is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the department of business administration of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his degrees from University of Texas at Dallas and Tianjin University, respectively. His research has been published, accepted, or revised at Annals of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Research, Production and Operations Management, Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, and Stochastics.