ISyE Seminar Series: Prof. Itai Gurvich

"The Value of Information and Cost of Randomness in Dynamic Resource Allocation"

Prof. Itai Gurvich

Professor 
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

About the Seminar:

We study the problem of dynamically allocating reusable resources to customers of n types. There are d pools of resources and a finite number of units from each resource.

If a customer request is accepted, the decision maker collects a type-dependent reward and the customer occupies, for a random service time, one unit from each resource in a set of these. Upon service completion, these resource units become available for future allocation. This is a loss network: requests that are not accepted leave immediately. The decision maker's objective is to maximize the long-run average reward subject to the resource-capacity constraint. This is the basic model for revenue management with reusable resources.

The goal is to develop a nearly optimal admission control algorithm. In the talk, I will consider the online problem against benchmarks that capture the value of information and the cost of randomness. The benchmarks will expose an interesting contrast with the perishable-resource case which serves as the basic model for network revenue management.
 

About the Speaker:

Itai Gurvich is a Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He earned a Ph.D. from the Decision, Risk and Operations department at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in 2008. After his PhD, he spent 8 years at Kellogg and 4 years at Cornell University’s campus in New York City (Cornell Tech) before returning to Kellogg in 2021. His research interests include performance analysis and optimization of processing networks and the theory of stochastic-process approximations. Professor Gurvich teaches courses on operations management and service analytics.