Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (January 30 – May 22)：
Wang’s dissertation project lies broadly in the fields of supply chain management and optimization. In particular, she will work on process flexibility. Wang tries to investigate the performance of a specific sparse production system configuration relative to the best performance achievable by full flexibility. She will analyze this problem from a distributionally robust optimization perspective - i.e., to quantity the effectiveness of the sparse structure relative to full flexibility without assuming the specific distribution of the product demand. Instead, the only information available is the mean and variance of the random demand, and Wang provides a performance guarantee for the sparse structure against the worst-case scenario.