Title:
Managing surges in online demand using bandwidth throttling: An optimal strategy amid the COVID-19 pandemic
Presenter:
Prof.Sandun Perera
About the presenter:
Sandun Perera is an Assistant Professor of Business Analytics and Operations at the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Management as well as an MBA and an M.S. in Supply Chain Management from the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He also holds a Ph.D. in Financial Mathematics, and Master of Science degrees in Statistics and Applied Mathematics, and in Mathematics from Florida Atlantic University. He earned his B.S. in Finance, Business, and Computational Mathematics with first-class honors from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
His research broadly focuses on Supply Chain Management, Disruptive Technologies in Operations Management, Healthcare Operations Management, Financial Engineering, interfaces between Operations, and the other functional areas in business. Dr. Perera has worked collaboratively with hospitals, blood banks, pharmaceutical companies, and retailers for his research and his work has appeared in journals such as Production and Operations Management, Annals of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Economics, Quantitative Finance, European Journal of Operational Research, Operations Research Letters, Annals of Finance, Transportation Research Part E, IEEE Transactions and Journal of the Operational Research Society. Before joining the University of Nevada, Dr. Perera was affiliated with the Flint School of Management (SOM) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan. He has received multiple research awards and grants including the Financial Services Section Best Research Paper Award (Second Place) from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Outstanding Faculty Award for Research from the SOM. He currently serves on the editorial review board of the Production and Operations Management Journal and Decision Sciences Journal.
Host:
Prof,Fang Weiguo
Time:2021.6.18 10:00-11:30
Held online via Tencent meeting
ID：359 157 579
摘要:
Managing supply chains requires quick access to the enterprise- and customer-facing online network applications and transparency of data across supply chains. While it is challenging to meet the rapidly growing demand for bandwidth to support supply chain applications in the Blockchain era, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered bandwidth demand surges across all online services such as the internet, content delivery, e-platforms, and social media. A sudden demand surge may impel users to lose their access or have a poor online experience due to bandwidth throttling by their Online Service Providers (OSPs). Earlier work on optimal throttling mechanism under stochastic demand has overlooked such demand surges. In this paper, we recast the user demand to adequately capture the demand surges, such as home bandwidth demand surges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we model the user demand as a geometric Levy (jump-diffusion) process. Within our general setting, we show that it is optimal for the OSP to follow a modified control-band policy that encompasses the existing results as a special case. Our numerical study not only enhances the current insights about the optimal throttling mechanism by including demand surges but also provides new insights concerning the nature of demand surges. For example, our study suggests that OSPs should initiate demand throttling at relatively lower usage levels if the likelihood of having demand surges is high; furthermore, we find that when OSPs are exposed to demand surges with higher intensities, it is optimal for them to wait until the usage level reaches a relatively high level before throttling it.
