Universität Wien

040684 PR KFK PM/SCM/TL: Practical Course Metaheuristics II (SCM) (2008W)

4.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 4 - Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Continuous assessment of course work

Block LV
11.11, 25.11,09.12.2008 09:00-14:00 Uhr Lab 6
13.01,27.01.2008 09:00-14:00 Uhr Lab 6

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 30 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Tuesday 11.11. 09:00 - 14:00 EDV-Labor 6
  • Tuesday 25.11. 09:00 - 14:00 EDV-Labor 6
  • Tuesday 09.12. 09:00 - 14:00 EDV-Labor 6
  • Tuesday 13.01. 09:00 - 14:00 EDV-Labor 6
  • Tuesday 27.01. 09:00 - 14:00 EDV-Labor 6

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

The course covers the application of metaheuristics to problems from supply chain management that students are likely to face in practice. We will study: (1) strategic network design, (2) raw material procurement and procurement auctions and (3) inventory placement in supply chains.
These problems are often hard to solve with exact planning methods. Thus, metaheuristics are widely applied in practice to reliably generate high quality solutions in reasonable time. We will study various metaheuristic solution approaches for these problems, figure out why and how they work well, and how they can be adapted to new problems which have not been solved before. This will contain some implementation effort, so that basic programming skills are helpful.

Assessment and permitted materials

Weekly home assignments (30%), term project (40%), final test (30%)

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

The goal of the course is that students build up an intuition whether and why a certain metaheuristic solves a certain planning problem from SCM well. Therefore, they will learn how to design efficient metaheuristics on their own. Students shall understand the impact of core design decisions which must be made for any metaheuristic: (1) developing a useful solution representation and (2) linking it to the choice of search operators, (3) evaluating the quality of solutions and (3) making sensible choices for initial solutions.
Through their own experience, discussion in class and working with the literature, students will build up a deep understanding of how metaheuristics for strategic network design, auctions and multi-echelon inventory problems should be designed in order to work well.

Examination topics

The course will consist of focused lectures on the SCM problems, as well as focused lectures on the design and application of metaheuristics. Students will work on exercises, cases and implementation tasks. Therefore, basic programming skills in a high-level programming language such as C, C++, Java, VB or other are required. A basic understanding of linear programming is helpful but not required.

Reading list

A literature list will be distributed after the start of the course.

Association in the course directory

Last modified: Mo 07.09.2020 15:29