Yehua Wei is an Associate Professor in the Decision Sciences area at Fuqua School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 2013. His research interest can be broadly defined as decisions under uncertainty, including optimization problems on operational and strategical levels. More recently, he has been working on topics in dynamic resource allocation, vehicle routing, strategic routing, and e-commerce fulfillment.
| Name of Speaker | Wei Yehua |
| Schedule | 25 February 2022, 10am – 11.30am
(60 min talk + 30 min Q&A) |
| Link to register | https://nus-sg.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZctdOmorjIjGdUto_SJO3EzN_kdorcJyJVr |
| Title | Approximate Submodularity in Network Design |
| Abstract | Network design problems are ubiquitous in long term planning for modern marketplaces, where firms constantly innovate new ways to match supply and demand. They are often challenging to solve due to the problem scale and the uncertainties that affect the decisions. In this talk, we establish a novel structural property for a large class of network design problems. The property can be interpreted as an approximate form of submodularity, where local changes in the objective function can be used to bound global changes. We use this structure to analyze simple heuristics and establish theoretical guarantees for network design problems in e-retailing, online market platforms, and manufacturing. Further, using our analysis, we identify new heuristics for solving network design problems that lead to an order of magnitude gains in computational efficiency, without loss of optimization performance. This is a joint work with Levi DeValve (Chicago) and Sasa Pekec (Duke). |
