Carlee Joe-Wong

Next Manufacturing Center seminars are open to Center members, as well as other interested members of the CMU community. Next Manufacturing Center Consortium members are able to participate online.

Speaker: Carlee Joe-Wong, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Topic: Resilient Supply Chains with Additive Manufacturing

Today’s manufacturing enterprises often rely on increasingly complex supply chains to provide the components they need to make their final products. This complexity and interdependence can render supply chains vulnerable to disruptions: for example, if a machine used to make many parts suddenly slows down and/or requires maintenance, this slowdown might bottleneck other fabrication tasks that use products made by this machine, leading to a cascade of disruptions. Additive manufacturing may help to mitigate such propagation of disruptions by offering an alternative fabrication avenue, but the complexity of supply chain relationships makes it difficult to optimize how such alternatives should be utilized in the supply chain. This challenge becomes even more difficult when we consider that workforce scheduling in manufacturing settings is often highly optimized for efficiency and productivity. I will discuss our work using reinforcement learning to optimize workforce scheduling and additive manufacturing deployments so as to make supply chains robust to cascading failures.

Biography

Carlee Joe-Wong is the Robert E. Doherty Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her A.B. degree (magna cum laude) in Mathematics, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied and Computational Mathematics, from Princeton University in 2011, 2013, and 2016, respectively. Her research interests lie in optimizing various types of networked systems, including applications of machine learning and pricing to cloud computing, mobile/wireless networks, and transportation networks. From 2013 to 2014, she was the Director of Advanced Research at DataMi, a startup she co-founded from her research on mobile data pricing. She received the NSF CAREER award in 2018 and the ARO Young Investigator award in 2019.