Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): Academic Exchanging with the School of Management and Engineering, Nanjing University

Before the seventh International Research Conference on Systems Engineering and Management Science (IRC-SEMS2019), Dr. KS Chin (Associate Professor, SEEM Dept., CityU) and Prof. Shen Houcai (沈厚才) (Professor, School of Mgt & Eng, Nanjing University) arranged an academic exchanging seminar for both research students.

Firstly, CityU research student introduced themselves and one of them from Africa.

Then Prof. Shen led his PhD students to introduce themselves too.

The first speaker was Mr. Chengshuo YING (CityU) and his topic was “Metro Train Scheduling by Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach”.

The second speaker was Mr. Li Yuanbo (Nanjing University) and his presentation named “Target-based Project Crashing Problem by Adaptive Distributionally Robust Optimization”. He would like to deal with uncertainties and multi-stage decision making problem.

Mr. E.S. Taiwo, Sunny (CityU) was the third speaker and his topic presented was “Outpatient Appointment Scheduling with Walk-ins and Open-access Patients”. He would like to determine the optimal appointment scheduling decision under different systems.

Ms. Mingdan Zhu (Nanjing University) was the fourth speaker and her topic named “Platorm, Reseller or Hybrid? A Strategic Analysis of Online Retailer with Network Effects”.

Students exchanging ideas and discussion were interesting and happiness.

The fifth speaker was Mr. Hao Liu (CityU) and his topic entitled “Designing Contracts for Competing Retailers under Asymmetric Demand Information”. He investigated the issue of contracting design and selection under asymmetric information in the supply chain consisting of the supplier and two competing retailers.

The sixth speaker was Ms. Jing Xia (Nanjing University) and her presentation was “Impact of Asymmetric Spillovers on Cost-reducing Investments of a Duopoly with Heterogeneous Products”. She also employed Nash equilibrium in game theory to explain uncertain market demand.

Mr. Deng Haozhen (CityU) was the seventh speaker and his topic named “Online and Offline Integration in Retail: The Impact of Buy-online-and-pick-up-in-store (BOPS) Partnership between Competitors”. He observed that product categories with high match probability, low online disutility were more suitable to sell through BOPS.

Ms. Zhao Chai (Nanjing University) was the eighth speaker and her topic named “Research on Data-driven Pricing for an Online Retailer”. Her research question was “How can an online retailer make full use of data to design a scientific pricing model and provide price decision support?”

I was the last speaker represented Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and Research Institute of Extenics and Innovation Methods, GDUT. My topics included “From Industry 4.0 to Quality 4.0 and Introduction of Extension Innovation Method with Application”. Firstly, I introduced HKSQ 30 year’s milestone.

Then I briefed the Quality Innovation development in Hong Kong.

I also mentioned Industry Revolution from the first to fourth that related to extension of our intelligent through AI.

After that I briefed three key innovation methodologies to students in which one is Extenics.

I briefed the history of Extenics which was created by Prof. Cai Wen (蔡文) on his first paper named “Extension Set and Incompatible Problem” in 1983. Prof. Cai used seven year to develop Extenics since 1976.

And then I briefed the basic theory of Extenics such as Extension Set Theory.

I also briefed the fundamental theory and started from Basic-element in which separated into 3 key elements and they were Object, Characteristic and Value.

Finally, I introduced one of application which combined Extenics and Six Sigma Methodology. The first study was done by Prof. Yang Chunyan (楊春燕) in 2017 and then I modified to be “DMA-METS-IC” for case study.