报告人简介：万国华，现任上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院教授。主要研究兴趣是：排序与调度的理论和算法、运营与供应链管理、企业信息管理。研究成果发表于Management Science, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing等国际学术刊物。现任美国生产与运作管理学会（POMS）旗舰刊物Production and Operations Management的Senior Editor，Journal of Management Analytics的Associate Editor和《系统管理学报》编委，中国运筹学会常务理事/医疗管理分会理事长和上海市运筹学会副理事长。

报告简介：Motivated by a project management problem faced by the CBG of Huawei Corporation, we study the problem of intraproject learning, where information gained from certain completed tasks in a project may be used to complete similar later tasks in the same project more efficiently. While the project management literature suggests the potential value of using this information within the same project, our work is apparently the first to model and optimize intraproject learning.  

We model the tradeoff between investing time in learning from completed tasks and achieving reduced durations for subsequent tasks, to minimize total project cost. We show intractability of the model and develop a heuristic that finds near optimal solutions and a strong relaxation that allows some learning from partially completed tasks. For the project at Huawei Corporation, our model and algorithm provide more than 20% improvement in project duration. In general, our model and algorithm provide learning solutions that enable reductions in project duration averaging 7% for projects with 40 tasks and 22% for those with 200 tasks. Our sensitivity analysis results identify project characteristics where intraproject learning is most beneficial, thus motivate project managers to understand and apply intraproject learning to improve the performance of their ongoing projects.