The labor shortage in the Netherlands has become a critical issue, affecting 75% of employers in recent years (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2024). This trend is driven by demographic shifts, increasing demand for part-time work, and heightened job satisfaction expectations, leading to intensified work pressure on existing employees. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a potential solution to these challenges, with pioneering systems like AlphaZero and ChatGPT demonstrating AI's capability to enhance worker productivity and optimize supply chain decisions.
Despite these advancements, the transition from theoretical models to real-world applications remains limited. This gap largely stems from a focus on technical algorithm functionality without adequately considering the human aspect crucial for practical deployment. Typical implementations keep humans in the loop, allowing employees to modify the algorithm's final output based on their unique insights and broader evaluation criteria, such as market share or sustainability. However, the support for making these adjustments is often inadequate, with outputs presented in a "take it or leave it" fashion, limiting the potential for human intervention to enhance decision-making effectively.
This Phd project aims to create a human-centric system that seamlessly integrates human knowledge into algorithmic decision processes, such as complex optimization models and reinforcement learning. By developing collaborative mechanisms, we supports humans in working effectively with complex decision algorithms. As part of the Phd project, you will
- develop novel algorithms and methods that underlie collaboration mechanisms to enable us to streamline human-algorithm interaction
- develop a realistic game-like environment of a supply chain context. This game environment will be used to test and evaluate the developed collaboration mechanisms (see here for an example).
A collaboration mechanism may entail interaction, feedback or automation mechanism. For examples of research in that area, you can have a look at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4292438, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2022.03.017.
The research project includes a consortium of interested companies, such as ASML and Fokker Services, which will give practical insights on challenges in human-machine collaboration. The problem setting will focus on supply chain management, inventory management, and transport management.
We are looking for someone who has the ambition to perform rigorous research that can be published in top journals in the field of Management Science and Operations Research.
Start date: As soon as possible; preference for but not required to start before February 1, 2025.