On the afternoon of March 12th, Assistant Professor Chen Zhi of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was invited to visit the School of Management to give an academic lecture on “Budget-Driven Multi-Period Hub Location: A Robust Time Series Approach”. Professor Yu Guodong, Director of the Institute of Industrial Engineering, presided over the lecture, which is one of the series of lectures on Discipline and Academic Innovation of the School.
“Budget-Driven Multi-Period Hub Location: A Robust Time Series Approach” is the latest research achievement of Assistant Professor Chen. He introduced the research from two perspectives: methodology and application. From the aspect of methodology, the research team constructed a “Nested” fuzzy set for random factors in the time-series model and demonstrated the measure concentration of the uncertainty set under the condition that the sample data of the historical data did not satisfy the i.i.d (independent identically distribution) hypothesis. Based on it, the statistical properties of finite sample guarantee and asymptotic convergence were obtained. At the same time, he emphasized that the measure employed is not only applicable to VAR(1) time series, but can be extended to VAR(p) time series and VARMA(p,q) time series. From the aspect of the application, the research team applied the proposed measure to the location problem of hub facilities under the multi-stage uncertain demand scenario and then built a budget-driven robust optimization model. The model can effectively conduct calculations by the binary search algorithm, and the obtained decisions can better meet the budget constraints of different stages than that of the classical distributional robust model. The teachers and students at the lecture actively carried out in-depth discussions on the technical barriers of the robust time series model and the practical significance of the modeling method with budget constraints.
Chen Zhi is an assistant professor and a doctoral supervisor at the Business School of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and an associate research fellow at the Shenzhen Research Institute of the CUHK. He obtained his PhD from NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, and his BE from Tsinghua University, China, and once conducted his postdoctoral research at Imperial College London in the UK. His primary research involves developing models and designing algorithms for analytics under uncertainty with different levels of data availability as well as applications in business, economics, finance, and operations. He is also interested in how to compete or cooperate in joint activities such as resource allocation and risk management. He used to work at the City University of Hong Kong, where he received the Research Excellence Award from the Business School. His works appear in journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, Mathematical Finance, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Transportation Science, and TRB.
