The connection of EE and SCM

Finally, I found a connection between EE ( my undergraduate major ) and SCM ( my current research interest ).

Yesterday, I call my 4 year roommate at JiaoTong Univ. , who is now at EE@UCSD. I happen to ask whether OR can be applied into his area. Originally, I just want to advocate the usage of OR and provide him a potential tool. It seems no many people use LP, IP, NLP to his area. After I push him think hard, he gave me a very interesting problem in the physical network design. He thinks that using large scale optimization model to solve real time network flow is not his favorite. i.e. he don't like the idea that doing optimization at server level and then telling what the router should do. Instead, he like to solve the problem at the router level and the objective is not far away from the global control.

That's the exact idea of centralized vs decentralized, which is one of the key concept of SCM. But the research on the complex supply network is far from mature. So I cannot give him a plausible method during the phone call.

Also his current internship at Motorola is to implement at heuristics to solve IP at cell phone. Although he uses the different langurage, it seems branch and bound is way to complex for the chip of cell phone.

Anyway, it is always interesting to find the people at different area trying to solve the similar problem.