Analyzing process flexibility: A distribution-free approach with partial expectations

We develop a distribution-free model to evaluate the performance of process flexibility structures when only the mean and partial expectation of the demand are known. We characterize the worst-case demand distribution under general concave objective functions, and apply it to derive tight lower boun...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bidkhori, Hoda, Simchi-Levi, David, Wei, Yehua
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Format: Article
Published: Elsevier 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114882
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4650-1519
Description
Summary:We develop a distribution-free model to evaluate the performance of process flexibility structures when only the mean and partial expectation of the demand are known. We characterize the worst-case demand distribution under general concave objective functions, and apply it to derive tight lower bounds for the performance of chaining structures under the balanced systems (systems with the same number of plants and products). We also derive a simple lower bound for chaining-like structures under unbalanced systems with different plant capacities. Keywords: Process flexibility; Distributionally-robust analysis; Chaining; Production system design