Research Focus

Research Focus and Scope

While LASCA aims to address the world’s dynamic and evolving challenges and opportunities, its current research focuses on the following streams of applications:

Managing Pandemic Supply Chains
Climate-Smart Food and Agriculture Supply Chains
Innovative Decision-Support for Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains with New Technologies: e.g., drones, blockchain, sensors, internet-of-things (IoT) and digital twin
Urban and Indoor/Vertical farming
Improve the Inland Waterway System and the Use of Mississippi River

From the methodology perspective, LASCA is interested in addressing and tackling the following challenges and opportunities in Optimization, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their interfaces with behavioral and social sciences:

Large-scale combinatorial optimization and stochastic optimization
Innovative ways to combine techniques in optimization, statistics, simulation and machine learning to solve large-scale Markov decision process (MDP) models, also known as stochastic dynamic programs
The human dimension of Analytics and AI: how behavioral science helps inform modeling through feedback of human acceptance/resistance to certain supply chain models

Research Sponsors

National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, 2023 – 2027