Prof. Suresh P. Sethi, PhD
Eugene McDermott Chair Professor of Operations Management
Director, Center of Intelligent Supply Networks
Naveen Jindal School of Management
The University of Texas at Dallas
e-mail: sethi@utdallas.edu
webpage: https://personal.utdallas.edu/~sethi/index.html
Title of the invited lecture: Managing with Incomplete Inventory Information
A critical assumption in the vast literature on inventory management has been that the current level of inventory is known to the decision maker. Some of the most celebrated results such as optimality of base-stock have been obtained under this assumption. Yet it is often the case in practice that the decision makers have incomplete or partial information about their inventory levels. The reasons for this are many: Inventory records or cash register information differ from actual inventory because of a variety of factors including transaction errors, theft, spoilage, misplacement, unobserved lost demands, and information delays. As a result, what are usually observed are some events or surrogate measures, called signals, related to the inventory level. At best, these relationships may provide only the distribution of current inventory levels. In the best case, therefore, the relevant state in the inventory control problems is not the current inventory level, but rather its distribution given the observed signals. Thus, the analysis for finding optimal production or ordering policies takes place generally in the space of probability distributions. The purpose of this talk is to review recent developments in the analysis of inventory management problems with incomplete information.
Short CV:
Suresh P. Sethi is Eugene McDermott Chair Professor of Operations Management and Director of the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks (C4ISN) at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has contributed significantly in the fields of manufacturing and operations management, finance and economics, marketing, industrial engineering, operations research, and optimal control. He is well known for his developments of the Sethi advertising model and Sethi-Skiba points, and for his text book on optimal control.
He has written 11 books and published over 400 research papers in the fields of manufacturing and operations management, finance and economics, marketing, and optimization theory. He teaches a course on optimal control theory/applications and organizes a seminar series on operations management topics. He initiated and developed the doctoral programs in operations management at both University of Texas at Dallas and University of Toronto.
He has received prestigious honors and awards such as IEEE Fellow, INFORMS Fellow, SIAM Fellow, POMS Fellow, AAAS Fellow, IITB Distinguished Alum, Tepper School of Business-Alumni Achievement Award, and POMS President (2012), INFORMS Fellows Selection Committee (2014-16), Alumni Achievement Award, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University (2015). Two conferences have been organized in his honor: in Aix en Provence in 2005 and at UT Dallas in 2006 with Harry M. Markowitz, a 1990 Nobel Laureate in Economics, as the keynote speaker. Also, two books have been edited in his honor. Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) has instituted a Suresh Sethi Best Interdisciplinary Paper Award given every two years beginning 2022.
He serves on the editorial boards of several journals including Production and Operations Management and SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization.