Centre for Strategy, Technological Innovation, and Operations Seminar with Dr Xiaolong Li (Durham University)

Find Targets, then Allocate by Debts: A Novel Stochastic Program Framework for Online Allocation Problems

Abstract

In this talk, I will introduce a novel stochastic program framework, called two-stage target-debt, for a series of online allocation problems with service level constraints. Unlike traditional approaches of making decision on original capacities or safety stocks prior to allocating resources, the problems we study require that allocating policies not only meet service levels, but also optimize objective values which depend on the realized allocation outcomes. To tackle this challenge, we consider introducing allocating targets as new requirements instead of original service levels. Under our two-stage framework, the allocating targets are decided first and then it devises an allocation policy to satisfy these targets in the second stage. Specifically, in the first stage, the optimal targets are obtained from a new target optimization, which achieve both the optimal value and service level requirements at the same time. We show the asymptotic equivalence between the original problem and the target optimization. In the second stage, we design a debt-weighted algorithm and demonstrate that, if the problem size scales to infinity, this algorithm is asymptotically optimal under the optimal targets. There illustrate two applications under this framework: an online advertisement allocation problem with limited budget constraints and click-through requirements, and a resource allocation problem with fulfilment rate requirements and an objective of optimizing network flows.

About the speaker

Dr Xiaolong Li is an Assistant Professor in Operations & Supply Chain Management of the Department of Management & Marketing at the Durham University Business School. Prior to joining Durham University, he was a Research Fellow of the Institute of Operations Research & Analytics at the National University of Singapore. He received PhD and MSc in Management Science and Engineering at the Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and BEng in Communications Engineering at the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. During his PhD, he once visited the Stern School of Business at the New York University for a year. His research interests lie in revenue management, online optimization, and data-driven optimization.