List of topics available for students

• New product development and demand planning
  Supply chain, production, demand planning, optimization

  The idea for this topic is to compare different policies for demand planning when a new/an alternative product is being introduced to the market. As different companies adopt different strategies for their production transition, various demand planning policies are adopted in companies. It is interesting to understand which of these policies must be implemented in each situation. Moreover, for introducing certain products in some markets, regulations are in place. Demand planning can be subject to these regulations. 

• Predicting/determining soccer player valuation based on their performance.
  Sport, AI, Prediction

  Can we determine the value of a player in European market based on their age, recent performance and other available metrics? The idea of this research is to build a model that helps determine the value of soccer players. Experience in at least one of the following is required:  Python/R/Rapidminer or similar tools/langauages.

• NBA expansion teams
  Sport, NBA, Expansion Teams

  NBA is going to expand its size. Within the next few years, NBA will decide to increase its size by 2. That means two new teams will be added. What teams are interesting choices to be  added to the NBA? What are main criteria for NBA in deciding which teams should be added? How the structure of the league is going to change? 

• The organ exchange problem: how to optimize the exchanges of organs between pairs of patient-doner?
  Operations Management / Optimization / Linear Programming

  The goal of this research topic is to investigate optimization opportunities in for organ exchange program within EU. The research include operational and legal aspects of organ exchange programs. 

• AI and outsourcing: New trends and opportunities
  Operations Management / Project Scheduling / Machien/Deep Learning
  In the modern world where businesses face the challenge of the rapid growth of competitors, only those who lead their business more effectively manage to survive and reach success. Outsourcing is one of the techniques that can help the business to reach advantages above opponents. Outsourcing has become more popular since international businesses have started to differentiate between, on the one hand, their core business processes in which they have the necessary expertise and which often provide them with the maximal profit and, on the other hand, the other auxiliary processes which usually have a rather supporting role for the sustainability of their business. There are several decisions to be made, and thus I propose three directions for research: 1. Some resources may be booked multiple times. When the handling cost is substantially smaller than the total renting cost, and when there are no physical or operational limitations, the project manager may decide to book the external resource more than once for multiple periods. Such a decision would be probable especially if a single booking leads to very long resource idle times. Allowing infinite bookings, the problem structure becomes very similar to that of the resource renting problem. 2. Installing a resource may not be possible if certain other resources are already installed, and as such their renting periods should not overlap. A pair of resources that cannot be rented for overlapping periods is referred to as a conflict pair. Conflict pairs are given in form of a set. Each pair of resources in such a set must not be present on-site at the same time (i.e., must not be rented for the same period). 3. Some tasks may only require one of several alternative resources. For example, a lifting task could be executed by either a crane or a lift. Developing a website is another example, for which we need either a PHP developer or a Ruby on Rails developer. Logical resource requirement expressions, which can be simple or rather complex, determine the resource requirements for activities. An example of a complex case is when a certain cutting activity requires either a combination of a semi-automated cutting machine and a technician or a single fully automated cutting machine. How can we use AI-related approaches to deal with the above decision-making problems?
• Machine/Deep learning approaches in project resource planning under uncertainty. (Topic 2)
  Operations Management / Project Scheduling / Machien/Deep Learning
  This research focuses on deep learning approaches to facilitate decision-making in a project with a high level of uncertainty. The goal is to find the answer to the question “How do we allocate resources?” If uncertain events interfere with the availability of resources in a project. Can we train a machine learning approach (say, a neural network) using past data that can help us make the best possible robust decision in terms of allocation of resources? The answer to the question is the goal of the thesis.
• Machine/Deep learning approaches in project activity planning under uncertainty. (Topic 1)
  Operations Management / Project Scheduling / Machien/Deep Learning
  This research focuses on deep learning approaches to facilitate decision-making in a project with a high level of uncertainty. The goal is to find the answer to the question “When do we start an activity?” if uncertain events interfere with the project plan. An example is when not predicted COVID-related restrictive measures prolong some activities in a project so much that the start time of many other related activities (usually the successors) are heavily impacted. Can we train a machine learning approach (say, a neural network) using past data that can help us make the best possible robust decision? The answer to the question is the goal of the thesis.

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