CAREER: Manufacturing Flexibility through Demand Chain Management

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

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.