CAMS Seminar with Nicolas Zufferey (Geneva School of Economics and Management)

Place : Sophia Antipolis Campus 
Time : 12:00AM- 02:00PM 
Speaker : Nicolas Zufferey (Geneva School of Economics ans Management) 

Biography :

Nicolas Zufferey is a full professor of operations management at the University of Geneva in Switzerland (where he has worked since 2008). His research activity focuses on designing solution methods for difficult and large optimization problems, with applications mainly in transportation, scheduling, production, inventory management, network design, supply chain management and telecommunications. He is member of the CIRRELT transportation and logistics research center (www.cirrelt.ca) and of the GERAD decision-analysis research center (www.gerad.ca). He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Mathematics at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne), as well as his PhD degree in Operations Research (2002). He was then successively a post-doctoral trainee at the University of Calgary (2003 – 2004) and an assistant professor at Université Laval (2004 – 2007). He is the (co)author of more than 150 publications (papers in academic journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters). With 87 coauthors, he has had research activities with 34 Universities (mainly in Europe and America), as well as with 27 private companies.

Abstract :

Satisfying the demand at the shop level while having a smooth production at the plant level are usually conflicting objectives in a supply chain. On the one hand, the production variations will be high if the shops can order upstream – anytime – exactly what they need. On the other hand, producing the same amount each day generates shortages downstream (e.g., in the shops). Seven objective functions are considered to represent the different goals of various stakeholders along the supply chain (from the shop to the plant).  This study, performed in collaboration with a major fast-moving consumer goods company, proposes a lexicographic model for managing the supply chain in an integrated manner. Because of the lexicography, we can only improve a lower-level objective if it does not deteriorate higher-level objectives. A local search is designed and combined with a well-known commercial solver. The local search has the particularity of employing various types of neighborhood structures in order to capture each objective funtion at the appropriate step of the search process. As compu