When
Thursday, November 7, 2024 - 2:00 p.m.
Jen Pazour
Professor and PhD Coordinator
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
"Optimization Models to Harness Underutilized Supply Chain Resources"
Engineering, Room 301
Abstract: Retail and distribution operations are undergoing a vast transformation, thanks to the rapid proliferation of e-commerce, and changing customer expectations for speed, product variety and omni-channel services, such as popular click and collect services. These expectations limit resource pooling opportunities and shift the material handling and logistical efforts previously done by shoppers to store resources. Thus, cost-effectively fulfilling such requests is a current challenge for retailers and an opportunity for the industrial and systems engineering research community. To meet customer requests, organizations need to think differently about how supply chain resources are acquired, managed, and allocated. This presentation will provide an overview of how our team creates new ways to harness underutilized supply chain resources, so resources with lower marginal costs can be accessed and deployed when and where they are needed. This includes our work on new network design models that incorporate on-demand warehousing options, as well as new crowdsourced order-fulfillment policies that deploys in-store customers to pick items for online orders while completing their own personal shopping. Our work in on-demand systems matches requests to independent, decentralized suppliers who are not employed nor controlled by the platform. In these situations, the platform cannot be certain a supplier will accept an offered request. To mitigate this selection uncertainty, our work supports platforms to offer each supplier a menu of requests to choose from, with applications to crowdsourced delivery, ride sharing and volunteer management. Finally, an interactive optimization framework is being developed to elicit, infer and integrate a broader range of knowledge from a human expert to increase model fidelity for supply chain design problems.
Some of this work was supported by NSF through CAREER award #1751801, the Office of Naval Research under grant number N00014-22-1-2542, through a Johnson and Johnson WiSTEM2D fellowship and through a Raymond University Research Program grant.
Biography: Jen Pazour is a professor and PhD coordinator in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. Her research and teaching focus on the development and use of mathematical models to guide decision making for logistics and supply chain challenges. Jen is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Scholars Award, a National Academies of Science Gulf Research Program Early-Career Fellowship and a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research. She was awarded the Rensselaer Alumni Teaching Award, the IISE Logistics and Supply Chain Division Teaching Award and the IISE Dr. Hamed K. Eldin Outstanding Early Career IE in Academia Award. She is an associate editor of IISE Transactions, OMEGA and Transportation Science. She is the president elect of INFORMS Transportations Science and Logistics (TSL) and was previously on the IISE Logistics and Supply Chain board. She holds three degrees in Industrial Engineering, a BS from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and a MS and PhD from the University of Arkansas. More information can be found at her research and teaching blog here.