Dawande, Milind W.

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10735.1/3677

Milind Dawande is the Ashbell Smith Professor of Operations Management. In 2019 he was made the Mike Redeker Distinguished Professor in Management. His research interests include:

Discrete Optimization
Linear and Integer Programming
Polyhedral Theory
Combinatorial Optimization
Logic-based Optimization Methods
Robotics
Discrete Optimization Models in Manufacturing and Operations
Network Design
Mathematical Programming Models in E-commerce

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On Member-Driven, Efficient and Fair Timeshare Exchanges
(Wiley, 2018-06-07) Cesaret, Bahriye; Dawande, Milind W,; Rajapakshe, Tharanga; 0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW); Dawande, Milind W.
Vacation Timeshare is a form of ownership or "right to use" of a resort property for a specific time period (typically a week) each year. Timeshare exchange refers to the non-monetary trading of timeshare weeks among owners, so that they can interchange their vacation homes to experience new destinations. The need for member participation during the exchange process has been well-recognized for a variety of practical reasons, including the reluctance of members to accept an authoritarian solution that does not provide any information about the exchange process and their desire to experience some control over the process. Another important need is to ensure that, given the members' preferences, an exchange solution offers collectively the best-possible improvement over their currently-owned weeks, while being "fair" to all participants. We suggest two objectives to capture the efficiency and fairness of an exchange solution. For the resulting bi-criteria problem, we show that a solution that is simultaneously near-optimal on both objectives may not exist. Our main contribution is an efficient algorithm in which (i) each member uses her private preference list to communicate with other members, and the members, through such communications, collectively achieve an individually rational allocation, and (ii) for any desired approximation bounds alpha and beta on, respectively, efficiency and fairness, the following property holds: if an (alpha, beta)-approximate solution exists, then the solution provided by the algorithm satisfies this approximation guarantee; otherwise, the solution is an alpha-approximation on the efficiency measure and, among all such allocations, has the best fairness measure.
Shaping the Values of a Milk Cooperative: Theoretical and Practical Considerations
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2019-05-22) Mu, L.; Dawande, Milind; Mookerjee, Vijay; 0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW); Dawande, Milind; Mookerjee, Vijay
Dairy cooperatives bestow upon farmers the virtues of controlling a large supply quantity of a relatively scarce product, that is, milk (e.g., higher bargaining power, fixed cost sharing, etc.). However, the cooperative structure also encourages individual farmers to free-ride (i.e., provide low-quality milk in the hope that other farmers provide good-quality milk). The question arises: How can the benefits of a cooperative be retained, while eliminating free-riding, especially when individual inspection costs are high? We examine this question from the perspective of a social planner, who wishes to achieve the simultaneous goals of quantity efficiency, quality efficiency, and minimal testing. The basic challenge in this quest is that of countering an endogenous value function associated with a coalition of farmers. This value function emerges from the joint interaction of three forces: (i) an individual farmer’s payment-maximizing behavior, (ii) the testing policies employed by the cooperative, and (iii) the manner in which the revenue earned by a coalition is shared among the farmers (allocation rule). A novel allocation rule—that exploits individual incentives to guide the collective behavior of the farmers and thereby the value–function endogeneity—is proposed that achieves the planner’s goals in the presence of these forces. A modification to this allocation rule is made to address the goals of practicality, e.g., the presence of low-income farmers and unintended variation in the quality of a farmer’s output. We examine our interventions in the light of sample data from actual dairy cooperatives to demonstrate the viability of our proposals. ©2019 Production and Operations Management Society
Role Refinement in Access Control: Model and Analysis
(Informs Inst. for Operations Res. and the Management Sciences) Xia, H.; Dawande, Milind W.; Mookerjee, Vijay S.; 0000 0001 1561 8354 (Dawande, MW); 2007039673 (Dawande, MW); 90649574‏ (Mookerjee, VS)
Access control mechanisms in software systems administer user privileges by granting users permission to perform certain operations while denying unauthorized access to others. Such mechanisms are essential to ensure that important business functions in an organization are conducted securely and smoothly. Currently, the dominant access control approach in most major software systems is role-based access control. In this approach, permissions are first assigned to roles, and users acquire permissions by becoming members of certain roles. However, given the dynamic nature of organizations, a fixed set of roles usually cannot meet the demands that users (existing or new) have to conduct business. The typical response to this problem is to myopically create new roles to meet immediate demand that cannot be satisfied by an existing set of roles. This ad hoc creation of roles invariably leads to a proliferation in the number of roles with the accompanying administrative overhead. Based on discussions with practitioners, we propose a role refinement scheme that reconstructs a system of roles to reduce the cost of role management. We first show that the role-refinement problem is strongly NP-hard and then provide two polynomial-time approximation algorithms (a greedy algorithm and a randomized rounding algorithm) and establish their performance guarantees. Finally, numerical experiments-based on a real data set from a firm's enterprise resource planning system-are conducted to demonstrate the applicability and performance of our refinement scheme.
Optimal Procurement Auctions under Multistage Supplier Qualification
(INFORMS) Chen, W.; Dawande, Milind W.; Janakiraman, Ganesh; 0000-0001-6956-0856 (Dawande, MW); 0000-0001-7386-4318 (Jamakiraman, G); Dawande, Milind W.; Janakiraman, Ganesh
We consider a firm that solicits bids from a fixed-sized pool of yet-to-be qualified suppliers for an indivisible contract. The contract can only be awarded to a supplier who passes a multistage qualification process. For each stage of the qualification process, the buyer incurs a fixed testing cost for each supplier she chooses to test. The buyer seeks an optimal mechanism-that is, one that minimizes her total expected cost. Motivated by the buyer's urgency (or the lack of it) of time for completing the qualification process, we obtain optimal mechanisms for two testing environments: (1) simultaneous testing, where in each stage, the buyer selects a subset of those suppliers who have passed all the previous stages and tests them simultaneously; and (2) nonsimultaneous testing, where the simultaneous-testing requirement is not imposed. Under simultaneous testing, the admission policy for selecting suppliers at each stage is based on nonuniformreserve-price thresholds. Under nonsimultaneous testing, too, the admission policy is threshold based, but the selection process is sequential in nature. The relative increase in cost due to the simultaneous-testing requirement is (under a mild condition) monotonically increasing in the number of suppliers, the expected multistage testing cost, and the overall passing probability. We also study the optimal sequencing of the qualification stages and show that the buyer should schedule the stages in increasing order of the ratio of their testing cost to their failing probability. Finally, for the simpler setting of a single-stage qualification process and a single supplier, we study a two-dimensional mechanism design problem where, in addition to cost, the passing probability is also private to the supplier. Here, too, threshold-based admission remains optimal, and the buyer offers either a pooling or a separating contract. Copyright: ©2018 INFORMS.
Fixed-Dimensional Stochastic Dynamic Programs: An Approximation Scheme and an Inventory Application
(INFORMS) Chen, Wei; Dawande, Milind; Janakiraman, Ganesh
We study fixed-dimensional stochastic dynamic programs in a discrete setting over a finite horizon. Under the primary assumption that the cost-to-go functions are discrete L♮-convex, we propose a pseudo-polynomial time approximation scheme that solves this problem to within an arbitrary prespecified additive error of ε > 0. The proposed approximation algorithm is a generalization of the explicit-enumeration algorithm and offers us full control in the trade-off between accuracy and running time. The main technique we develop for obtaining our scheme is approximation of a fixed-dimensional L♮-convex function on a bounded rectangular set, using only a selected number of points in its domain. Furthermore, we prove that the approximation function preserves L♮-convexity. Finally, to apply the approximate functions in a dynamic program, we bound the error propagation of the approximation. Our approximation scheme is illustrated on a well-known problem in inventory theory, the single-product problem with lost sales and lead times. We demonstrate the practical value of our scheme by implementing our approximation scheme and the explicit-enumeration algorithm on instances of this inventory problem.
Optimal Software Reuse in Incremental Software Development: A Transfer Pricing Approach
(INFORMS) Ceran, Yasin; Dawande, Milind; Liu, Dengpan; Mookerjee, Vijay S.; 90649574‏ (Mookerjee, VS)
This study develops optimal transfer pricing schemes that manage software reuse in incremental software development, namely, a development regime wherein users begin utilizing parts of the system that are released to them even before the system is entirely completed. In this setting, conflicts can arise between developers and users from divergent interests concerning the release of functionalities in the project. The release of functionalities is influenced by reuse, i.e., the effort spent by the development team to write code that can be reused within the same project or in future projects. For example, the development team may choose to spend extra effort to make certain portions of the system reusable because doing so could reduce the effort needed to develop the entire system. However, the additional effort spent on reuse could delay the release of certain critical functionality, making such a strategy suboptimal for the users. Thus, optimal reuse decisions for developers and users could be different. In addition, from the firm's perspective, reuse decisions must not only balance the objectives of developers and users for the current project, but reuse effort may be spent to benefit future projects. Our study also highlights the fact that reuse may not always be beneficial for the firm. To this end, we consider different instances of the user-developer conflict and provide transfer pricing schemes that operate under information asymmetry and achieve two key properties: firm-level optimality and truth revelation.

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