MIT-Zaragoza Speaker Series: Herminia I. Calvete

Herminia I. Calvete
Professor of Statistics and Operations Research
Statistical Methods Department
University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

“Bilevel Programming Approach to Production/Distribution Planning”

This talk addresses a hierarchical production-distribution planning problem. There are two different decision makers controlling the production and the distribution processes, respectively, that do not cooperate because of different optimization strategies.

The distribution company, which is the leader of the hierarchical process, controls the allocation of retailers to each depot and the routes which serve them. In order to supply items to retailers, the distribution company orders the items which have to be available at the depots from the manufacturing company. The manufacturing company, which is the follower of the hierarchical process, reacts to these orders by deciding which manufacturing plants will produce them. A bilevel programming problem is proposed to model the system and an ant colony optimization (ACO) based approach is developed to solve the bilevel model.

Bio

Herminia I. Calvete is Professor of Statistics and Operations Research in the Statistical Methods Department of the University of Zaragoza, where she teaches courses on Mathematical Programming and Stochastic Models. She is also the Head of the Optimization and Simulation Research Group. During her career she has published over sixty research papers in the fields of optimization theory and statistics. Her current interests are in bilevel programming, multi-objective programming, routing problems and network flow programming.