Browsing by Subject "Supply chain management"
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Item Adaptive trading agent strategies using market experience(2011-05) Pardoe, David Merrill; Stone, Peter, 1971-; Miikkulainen, Risto; Mooney, Raymond; Saar-Tsechansky, Maytal; Wellman, MichaelAlong with the growth of electronic commerce has come an interest in developing autonomous trading agents. Often, such agents must interact directly with other market participants, and so the behavior of these participants must be taken into account when designing agent strategies. One common approach is to build a model of the market, but this approach requires the use of historical market data, which may not always be available. This dissertation addresses such a case: that of an agent entering a new market in which it has no previous experience. While the agent could adapt by learning about the behavior of other market participants, it would need to do so in an online fashion. The agent would not necessarily have to learn from scratch, however. If the agent had previous experience in similar markets, it could use this experience to tailor its learning approach to its particular situation. This dissertation explores methods that a trading agent could use to take advantage of previous market experience when adapting to a new market. Two distinct learning settings are considered. In the first, an agent acting as an auctioneer must adapt the parameters of an auction mechanism in response to bidder behavior, and a reinforcement learning approach is used. The second setting concerns agents that must adapt to the behavior of competitors in two scenarios from the Trading Agent Competition: supply chain management and ad auctions. Here, the agents use supervised learning to model the market. In both settings, methods of adaptation can be divided into four general categories: i) identifying the most similar previously encountered market, ii) learning from the current market only, iii) learning from the current market but using previous experience to tune the learning algorithm, and iv) learning from both the current and previous markets. The first contribution of this dissertation is the introduction and experimental validation of a number of novel algorithms for market adaptation fitting these categories. The second contribution is an exploration of the degree to which the quantity and nature of market experience impact the relative performance of methods from these categories.Item Coordination of supply chain inventory systems with private information(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Chu, Chi-LeungThis dissertation considers the problems of coordinating different supply chain inventory systems with private information under deterministic settings. These systems studied are characterized by the following properties: (a) each facility in the system has self decision-making authority, (b) cost parameters of each facility are regarded as private information that no other facilities in the system have access to, and (c) partial information is shared among the facilities. Because of the above properties, the existing approaches for systems with global information may not be applicable. Thus, new approaches for coordinating supply chain inventory systems with private information are needed. This dissertation first studies two two-echelon distribution inventory systems. Heuristics for finding the replenishment policy of each facility are developed under global information environment. In turn, the heuristics are modified to solve the problems with private information. An important characteristic of the heuristics developed for the private information environment is that they provide the same solutions as their global information counterpart. Then, more complex multi-echelon serial and assembly supply chain inventory systems with private information are studied. The solution approach decomposes the problem into separate subproblems such that the private information is divided as required. Global optimality is sought with an iterative procedure in which the subproblems negotiate the material flows between facilities. At the core of the solution procedure is a node-model that represents a facility and its corresponding private information. Using the node-model as a building block, other supply chains can be formed by linking the node-models according to the product and information flows. By computational experiments, the effect of the private information on the performance of the supply chain is tested by comparing the proposed approach against existing heuristics that utilize global information. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides comparable results as those of the existing heuristics with global information.Item Identifying business knowledge areas that are critical to attaining supply chain performance(Texas Tech University, 2011-02) Maku, Tosanwunmi ChristopherBusiness practitioners and academicians have alluded to the leverage attainable from SCM engagements. With increased research involvement over the past two decades, various researchers have faulted the literature for the limited human resource system focus. This research was motivated by the dearth of inquiry at understanding the interrelationship across the human resource system and supply chain performance. The contribution to this knowledge gap was reflected in the research question: What are the supply chain business knowledge areas that characterize the impact of human interaction on supply chain management performance? The study objectives included: (a) to develop a theoretical model that depicts the human resource system across supply chains, (b) to define human interaction in supply chains, (c) to operationalize this definition by identifying business knowledge domains that impact supply chain performance. Following an exhaustive literature review, human interaction in supply chains was defined as the region of intersection between work functions and business processes; including man-machine activity requiring human intervention, and human-to-human activity, whose outcome serves to execute strategy.
A sample of management-level personnel from US based 3PL firms participated in a three round Delphi procedure designed to divulge insights related to the research question. A second sample constituted with academic professors provided an independent group response that was compared with the 3PL practitioner sample.
The research findings implied that CRM, transportation, and logistics were important business knowledge areas that impact supply chain performance at the work function, business process, and financial performance levels, thus supporting the investigation of human resource performance measurement at these levels. The results also alluded to relationship management and cross-functional business management as important business domains for supply chain management-level work. Additionally, the results supported the notion that practitioners and academicians do not always have divergent viewpoints concerning supply chain issues.Item Issues in operations management and marketing interface research : competition, product line design, and channel coordination(2010-05) Chen, Liwen, 1974-; Gilbert, Stephen M.; Gutierrez, Genaro J.; Balakrishnan, Anant; Feng, Qi; Xia, YusenThis dissertation studies important issues in supply chain management and marketing interface research: competition, product line design, and channel efficiency, at the presence of vertically differentiated products. Vertical differentiation as a means of price discrimination has been well-studied in both economics and marketing literature. However, less attention has been paid on how vertical differentiation has been operationalized. In this dissertation, we focus our study on two types of vertical differentiation: the one created by a product line which is produced by the same firm, and the one created by products from different firms. We especially are interested in the so-called private label products vs. the national brand products. Specifically, this dissertation explores how vertical differentiation can affect the interactions among the members of a supply chain in several different contexts. In the first piece of work, we use a game theoretic model to explore how the ability of a retailer to introduce a private label product affects its interaction with a manufacturer of a national brand. In the second essay, we are investigating how an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) will be affected by the entry of a competitor when there are strategic suppliers of a critical component. If these suppliers behave strategically, it is not clear that the entry of other players will necessarily be harmful to the incumbent. In the last work, we pay our attention to an emerging change happening in the industry: some retailers begin to sell their private labels through their competitors. We investigate the strategic role of a retailer selling her own private label products through another retailer. In summary, this dissertation illustrates how vertical differentiation play a crucial role in firms' supply chain as well as marketing strategies. Therefore, it is important for firms to recognize these strategic issues related to vertically differentiated products while making operations/marketing decisions.