IEM assistant professor Juan Borrero receives CAREER award from NSF
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Juan Borrero, assistant professor in the School of Industrial Engineering and Management received a CAREER award from National Science Foundation (NSF) in the amount of $500,000.
This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant supports research that
will investigate theoretical and computational approaches to commit or defer problems
with decision-making hierarchies. Problem settings in vaccine design, disaster response,
and smuggling prevention, among others, involve decision-makers observing a system
evolving over time who periodically decide whether to commit non-renewable resources,
or defer their use, to optimize the system's overall performance. The evolution of
the system is subject to randomness and its performance may depend on other decision
makers, about whom there may be incomplete information, who seek to optimize their
own performance. The research supported by this award seeks to determine what rules
should guide commit or defer decisions in these settings, how and to what extent the
decision-maker should use the information feedback observed, and how to computationally
find the commit or defer decisions in specific problem settings. The educational activities
include the creation of an online game to teach fundamentals of multistage decision-making
to K-12 students.
Standard commit or defer problems (CDPs) assume a single decision-maker and cannot
model problems that involve multiple decision-makers, e.g., a Leader and a Follower,
who interact in a hierarchical manner. This project will establish a mathematical
and algorithmic framework to solve hierarchical CDPs. The framework will improve our
understanding of real-life CDPs and their practical requirements. The project will
simultaneously address a number of technical challenges. First, the Leader may face
global resource constraints, such that the resources spent in one period, cannot be
replenished in future periods; second, the Leader's performance depends on the optimal
actions of the Follower; and third, the Leader learns about the uncertain parameters
of the Follower's problem by observing their reaction to the Leader's actions. By
using approaches at the interface of hierarchical and online optimization, the project
will rigorously establish the manner by which commit or defer decisions should be
made in hierarchical settings under uncertainty. Furthermore, the project will use
tools from mathematical programming and probability to uncover how and to what extent
the decision-maker should use the information that is learned, and then formulate
and solve for optimal or near optimal policies in large instances of relevant applications.