Models for Optimization of Industrial Research Management
Event details
| Date | 14.06.2011 |
| Hour | 11:15 |
| Speaker | Dr Debasis Mitra, Bell Labs Lucent Technologies |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
We describe work on modeling of industrial laboratories and the use of the models for optimization and control of management processes. The industrial laboratory is viewed as being analogous to a knowledge factory, where research is done at the first stage and is followed by development stages, which terminate with hand-off to the market or other organizations. Uncertainty is pervasive in this framework. There is randomness in the processing time at each stage. Also, stochastic processes govern the evolution of project values through the stages. Management is two-fold, project and investment. Option value is the methodology for project management. It relies on infrastructure support that enables information on project values to be collected after each stage. Such information allows calculations to be made of the option value, which is the expected terminal value of a project that takes into account future decisions. This allows mid-course decisions to be made on whether to allow projects to continue or be terminated, which occurs if its option value drops to zero. Investment optimization concerns allocation of given budgets to the resources in the various stages. Yet another important management mechanism that is considered is controlled access to resources and servers in the development stages. Projects with higher option values are given priority in accessing resources. For the special case of two stages, research and development, we consider a combined model of investment optimization in the presence of optimal project and resource management. For this case results from an asymptotic analysis provide insights on optimal management decisions. Finally, time permitting, we will descrbe preliminary results of an endogeneous growth model in a slow time scale. Throughout the talk we give numerical examples to illustrate concepts. Prof. Mitra's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free