11/12/2015 Emily Scott
Xin’s research is focused in supply chain and inventory management, optimization under uncertainty, data-driven decision making, and revenue management.
Written by Emily Scott
Assistant Professor Linwei Xin’s paper, “Asymptotic optimality of Tailored Base-Surge policies in dual-sourcing inventory systems,” recently won two prizes at the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting: the first place prize in the 2015 George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition and the second place prize in the 2015 Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) Paper Competition.
The paper, co-authored by Professor David Goldberg, addresses dual-sourcing inventory systems. In these systems, one supplier is faster, but more costly. The other is cheaper, but slower.
Dual-sourcing inventory systems create a problem in that they’re difficult to optimize. Recently, Tailored Base-Surge policies have been proposed as a heuristic for such models, and are shown numerically to perform well as the lead time difference between the two suppliers grows large. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for this phenomenon.
When Xin worked as a data science intern at Walmart.com this past summer, these policies were tested for the company and produced positive results. Now, Walmart.com is in the progress of implementing this policy.
Xin said these findings are important because they solve major open problems in this field.
“We feel very excited about this prize, because it’s quite competitive,” he said.
Xin’s research is focused in supply chain and inventory management, optimization under uncertainty, data-driven decision making, and revenue management.