Events - 2018

ExpecTAtions is a two-day workshop that prepares Waterloo Engineering students to undertake a teaching assistantship. To serve as a TA, you are required to complete the ExpecTAtions workshop. After full attendance and successful completion of all required activities you will receive a certificate noting your achievement.

This study examines how duration of patent examination is affected by technological diversity of patent applications, using a sample of all pharmaceutical patent applications filed between 1985 and 2017 at China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). Patent examination is a crucial process to evaluate the patentability of technological inventions. To understand what factors influence patent examination duration can offer strategic insights for both patent applicants and patent system designers.

We compare two models of a multi-server queueing system with state-dependent service rates and return probabilities. In both models, upon completing service, customers are delayed prior to possibly returning to service. In one model, the determination of whether a customer will return occurs immediately upon service completion, at the beginning of the delay. In the other, that determination is made at the end of the delay, capturing the idea that it takes time for the customer’s condition and needs to evolve or assess, before it becomes known whether a return to service is needed.

Is communicating via Skype or other video media equivalent to a face-to-face meeting? We have known for some time that after interacting face-to-face, people can predict the cooperative behaviour of strangers with better-than-chance accuracy. But is this ability affected when communications are mediated by video technology? This study reports four laboratory experiments examining how different communication conditions affect cooperation prediction efficacy.

Supervisors

Mark Hancock, Management Sciences

Miguel Nacenta, Management Sciences

This paper investigates the impacts of two environmental policies: pollution abatement subsidy and emission tax, on a three-tier supply chain, where the manufacturer distributes via multiple competitive retailers and invests in a pollution abatement technology in manufacturing. The government pursues social welfare maximization, while the manufacturer and retailers are profit driven. We find that the subsidy policy offers the manufacturer greater incentives to abate pollution and yields higher profits for channel members.

Supervisors

Frank Safayeni

Selcuk Onay

A Cross-Dock (CD) is a synchronized unit of a supply chain network, used to sort the goods received from inbound trucks (from a warehouse or factory), and load those products to outbound trucks (for delivery of the goods to retail stores in the supply chain network). Most cross-docks use forklifts, and other manual material handling equipment (MHE) to process the goods on pallets received from inbound trucks. Those pallets are sorted and loaded onto outbound trucks.

Supervisor: Fatih Erenay

We present a framework for a class of sequential decision-making problems in the context of max-min bi-level programming, where a leader and a follower repeatedly interact. At each period, the leader allocates resources to disrupt the performance of the follower (e.g., as in defender-attacker or interdiction problems), who in turn minimizes some cost function over a set of activities that depends on the leader’s decision.

Supervisors

Samir Elhedhli

Fatih Erenay