Systems Engineering Team won the 2nd place Award in the Graduate Student Paper Competition in the 5th North American IEOM) Conference

A team of Systems Engineering department won the second place in the Graduate Student Paper Competition at the 5th North American IEOM (Industrial Engineering & Operations Management) Conference, Detroit, Michigan, USA, which was held online from 10 to 14 August 2020.

The authors of the winning paper are Abdulrahman Afzal, a master’s student and Dr. Hisham Al-Faris, chairman of Systems Engineering department. The winning research paper discussed an innovative model that reduces the cost of the inventory systems.

The paper extends inventory models for growing items by considering quality inspections, permissible shortages with complete backordering, and holding cost during both the growth period and the consumption period. By backordering shortages, the firm can avoid the loss of sales by paying delay penalties to customers who wait for late items.

After the items grow to maturity, they are fully inspected, and lower-quality items are removed at the end of the inspection period. The model determines the optimum cycle length and shortage level to minimize the total cost of the inventory system. This cost includes the purchasing, setup, inspection, feeding, holding, and shortage costs. A nonlinear programming model is formulated and an optimum solution algorithm is presented.