Recently, INFORMS Journal on Computing has published online the research paper titled "Assortment Optimization with General Linear Constraints Under the Paired Combinatorial Logit Choice Model" by Associate Professor Feng Jianguang from the School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University. Associate Professor Feng Jianguang is the first author, and Professor Che Ada is the second author of the paper. As the official journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), INFORMS Journal on Computing is a top journal in the field of operations optimization and one of the 24 leading academic journals for business schools (UTD‑24) selected by the University of Texas at Dallas.

Assortment optimization has a wide range of application scenarios in e-commerce, retail and other industries. For the assortment optimization problem under the paired combinatorial logit model, existing studies mainly focus on special constrained cases such as unconstrained, cardinality and knapsack constraints, and concentrate on the development of approximation algorithms. Targeting this assortment optimization problem subject to general linear constraints, this paper proposes various exact solution methods including mixed-integer programming formulation, improved Benders decomposition algorithm and parametric search. Computational experiments show that the methods developed in this research can efficiently and exactly solve large-scale assortment optimization problems and meet the optimization requirements under complex general linear constraints.

About the speaker:Feng Jianguang is an Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University. His research focuses on theories and methods of combinatorial optimization related to complex operations and management. He has presided over one Youth Project and one General Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. His research findings have been published in journals such as INFORMS Journal on Computing and European Journal of Operational Research. He has received the Second Prize of Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award and the First Prize of Outstanding Scientific and Technological Research Achievements in Shaanxi Universities.

(Written by:Discipline & Scientific Research Office Reviewed by:Jia Ming)