Seminar — Dr. Seyyed Ehsan Hashemi-Petroodi

The Industrial AI Group hosted Dr. Seyyed Ehsan Hashemi-Petroodi, an Assistant Professor in Operations Management and Information Systems, for a guest seminar on September 26, 2025.

Speaker Background

Dr. Hashemi-Petroodi earned his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from IMT Atlantique in France. His expertise encompasses combinatorial and robust optimization, reconfigurable assembly line design, workforce and process planning, and decision support systems.

Seminar Content

The presentation covered research from KEDGE Business School, including the EU Horizon MODALSHIFT project focusing on multimodal transportation and dynamic decision-making.

Study 1 — Product Evolution

Dr. Hashemi-Petroodi presented work on managing assembly line design when product families evolve under uncertain demand. A novel mathematical model utilizing Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) combined with an adversarial approach demonstrated significant cost reductions compared to traditional periodic strategies.

Study 2 — Dynamic Re-balancing

The second investigation addressed assembly line rebalancing when facing unpredictable product sequences, modeling this challenge as a Markov Decision Process integrated with MILP. Results showed dynamic task assignments outperformed static approaches.

Discussion

The session concluded with collaborative discussion exploring uncertainty challenges in assembly systems and potential applications of reinforcement learning for human-robot collaboration.