On the afternoon of December 19, 2024, at the invitation of the School of Management, Professor Frederic Semet from École Centrale de Lille, France, conducted academic exchanges with faculty and students of the school and delivered an academic lecture titled "Models and Methods for Two-Level Uncapacitated Facility Location Problems" in Lecture Hall 214 of the School of Management. This lecture marked the 31st session of the 2024 Overseas Lecture Series hosted by the School of Management. Chaired by Associate Professor Yuan Yuan, it was attended by some faculty members and graduate students from the School of Management.

Professor Frederic Semet shared his research on the Two-Level Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem with Single Assignment Constraints (TUFLP-S) with the audience. This problem is commonly encountered in industrial applications such as freight transportation and telecommunications. He reviewed the practical application scenarios that inspired research on TUFLP-S, and sequentially introduced his multiple research works and corresponding achievements on this problem, including the establishment and improvement of models, heuristic algorithms, and matheuristic algorithms. In particular, he provided a detailed introduction and analysis of the model establishment and enhancement. At the end of the lecture, Professor Semet presented the computational results for complex industrial application cases.

This lecture sparked extensive discussions among the faculty and students present, who engaged in in-depth exchanges with Professor Frederic Semet regarding the lecture content. Associate Professor Yuan Yuan summarized the lecture. The participants responded enthusiastically, which greatly stimulated their research enthusiasm and interest, providing new ideas and motivation for future research work.

[Lecturer's Biography]

Frederic Semet is a Professor at École Centrale de Lille, France, and serves as the Deputy Director of the Research Center in Information, Signal and Automation of Lille (CRIStAL). He has conducted in-depth research in logistics and supply chain management, transportation, and complex structure optimization.

He has achieved fruitful research results, publishing over 100 papers in the field of operations research and optimization. These include 3 papers in Operations Research, 1 paper in INFORMS Journal on Computing, and more than 40 papers in internationally renowned j

ournals such as Transportation Science, European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, and Computers and Operations Research.