Integrating Simulation, Optimization and Reinforcement Learning for Supply Chain and Operations Planning
Many planning problems in supply chain and operations management require decisions to be made sequentially under uncertainty. Examples include sourcing, production and distribution in manufacturing, resource-constrained project scheduling in R&D, and resource planning in professional services. In this talk, I introduce a general and flexible modeling framework based on Markov decision process (MDP) to obtain dynamic and adaptive closed-loop solutions. To tackle the curse-of-dimensionalities of solving large-scale MDPs, an algorithmic approach that integrates simulation, optimization, and reinforcement learning in AI (Sim-Opt-RL) will be elaborated to offer computationally tractable high-quality solutions. Applications of Sim-Opt-RL on several variants of stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problems (SRCPSP) will be showcased.

