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NetGCooP  2011 International Conference on NETwork Games, COntrol and OPtimization

October 12-14, 2011, Paris, France

Plenary Talk Speakers

Anna Nagurney: Grand Challenges and Opportunities in Supply Chain Network Analysis and Design

Abstract:

Supply chain networks provide the backbones for our economies since they involve the production, storage, and distribution of products as varied as vaccines and medicines, food, high tech products, automobiles, clothing, and even energy. Many of the supply chains today are global in nature and time-sensitive and present challenging aspects for modeling and analysis. In this talk, I will discuss different perspectives for supply chain modeling, analysis, and computation based on centralized vs. decentralized decision-making behavior, along with suitable methodological frameworks. I will also highlight applications of our research to empirical electric power supply chains, to mergers and acquisitions, to supply chains in nature, and even to humanitarian logistics and health care applications from blood supply chains to medical nuclear ones. Such timely issues as risk management, demand uncertainty, outsourcing, and disruption management in the context of our recent research on supply chain network design and redesign will also be discussed. Suggestions for new directions and opportunities will conclude this talk.

Biographical Sketch

Anna Nagurney is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor in the Department of Finance and Operations Management in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also an Affiliated Faculty Member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass Amherst. She is the first female to be appointed to a named Professorship in the University of Massachusetts system. She is the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and the Supernetworks Laboratory for Computation and Visualization at UMass Amherst. She received her AB, ScB, ScM, and PhD degrees from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She devotes her career to education and research that combines operations research/management science, economics, and engineering. Her focus is the applied and theoretical aspects of decision-making on network systems, particularly in the areas of transportation a nd logistics, energy and the environment, and economics and finance. Her most recent book, with Q. Qiang, is Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, published by John Wiley & Sons. She is also the author of Supply Chain Network Economics: Dynamic of Prices, Flows, and Profits, and has authored or co-authored 8 other books including Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age, Financial Networks, Sustainable Transportation Networks, and Network Economics, has edited the book, Innovations in Financial and Economic Networks, and has authored or co-authored more than 185 refereed journal articles and book chapters.

She has given invited and plenary talks in Austria, Ukraine, Sweden, New Zealand, China, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, Cyprus, Iceland, the US, and other countries and her research has garnered funding from many foundations, including the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and AT&T. She has been a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, has held several Fulbright awards, and has had visiting appointments at MIT, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and at Brown University.
She has been a featured panelist at the World Science Festival in NYC and at the AAAS and Transportation Research Board meetings in Washington DC.
Among the awards that she has received include the Kempe Prize from the University of Umea in Sweden, the Moving Spirit Award and the WORMS Award from INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and the Chancellor's Medal from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Her most recent award is the Jane F. Garvey Transportation Leadership Award, which she received in 2011.
Asuman Ozdaglar: Flow Representations of Games: Near Potential Games and Dynamics

Abstract:

Despite much interest in using game theoretic models for the analysis of resource allocation problems in multi-agent networked systems, most of the existing works focus on static equilibrium analysis without establishing how an equilibrium can be reached dynamically. In the theory of games, natural distributed dynamics reach an equilibrium only for restrictive classes of games; potential games is an example. These considerations lead to a natural and important question: can we have a systematic approach to analyze dynamic properties of natural update schemes for general games?
Motivated by this question, this talk presents a new approach for the analysis of games, which involves viewing preferences of agents over the strategy profiles as flows on a graph. Using tools from the theory of graph flows (which are combinatorial analogues of those for continuous vector fields), we show that any finite strategic form game can be written as the direct sum of a potential game, a harmonic game, and a nonstrategic part. Hence, this decomposition leads to a new class of games, "harmonic games", with well-understood equilibrium and dynamic properties. Moreover, this approach allows projecting an arbitrary game onto the space of potential games using convex optimization techniques and exploit the relation between the two games to analyze the static and dynamic equilibrium properties of the original game. The second part of the talk uses this idea to study a non-cooperative power control game and investigate the system optimality properties along dynamic trajectories of natural user update schemes for this game.
This is joint work with Ozan Candogan, Ishai Menache, and Pablo Parrilo.

Biographical Sketch

Asu Ozdaglar received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1996, and the S.M. and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1998 and 2003, respectively.

Since 2003, she has been a member of the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is currently the Class of 1943 Associate Professor. She is also a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Operations Research Center. Her research interests include optimization theory, with emphasis on nonlinear programming and convex analysis, game theory, with applications in communication, social, and economic networks, and distributed optimization and control. She is the co-author of the book entitled "Convex Analysis and Optimization" (Athena Scientific, 2003).
Professor Ozdaglar is the recipient of a Microsoft fellowship, the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching award, the NSF Career award, the 2008 Donald P. Eckman award of the American Automatic Control Council, and is a 2011 Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. She served on the Board of Governors of the Control Systems Society in 2010 and is currently the chair of the working group "Game-Theoretic Methods in Networks" under the Technical Committee "Networks and Communication Systems".
Onno Boxma: Polling - analysis, optimization and control

Abstract:

A polling model is a queueing model consisting of several queues, which are cyclically visited by a server. The server visits the queues according to some discipline, like $1$-limited (serve at most one customer in a visit) or exhaustive (serve a queue until it has become empty). Polling models find many applications in computer-communications, and also in other areas like maintenance, production-inventory systems, and signallized traffic intersections.
The first part of the talk contains a global introduction to polling systems, and a review of some of their key properties. In the second part of the talk I'd like to describe some recent and ongoing work with Kamil Kosi\'nski and Offer Kella (on joint queue length and joint workload distributions) and with Ivo Adan, Urtzi Ayesta, Josine Bruin, Brian Fralix, Vidyadhar Kulkarni, Maaike Verloop, Adam Wierman and Erik Winands (on various scheduling and optimization problems in polling systems).

Biographical Sketch