supply chain analysts

Abstract: An evidence-review system must allocate additional model judgments and control their use. We study these software decisions on 6,164 frozen manufacturing source-task pairs. Benefit-targeted routing learns recovered agreement minus newly introduced disagreement. On the original 300-case test, 60 consultations yield 202/231 agreements with two human references versus 189/218 for a logistic-risk router. An additional 300 cases were independently annotated twice using equal frozen evidence. Without retraining the historical policies, the corresponding counts are 164/190 versus 163/193; the differences do not resolve an advantage. Strict scalar-Ridge controls share preprocessing, regularization and fitting, and remain inconclusive. Quotation and requested-state replacement gates retain rejected cases and budget costs; their joint gate rejects one original and two additional consultations without changing primary outcomes. Evidence ablations, fusion and bounded updates supply further controls. A completed 200-pair identity audit yields 97.45 percent weighted merge precision after eight author adjudications. This audits a provisional map, while prospective company-disjoint performance remains untested.

Abstract: Heterogeneous optimization problems require an optimizer to decide not only which candidate solutions to evaluate, but also which objectives and constraints should be evaluated under different costs and fidelities. Existing SOTA methods such as MFE-NSGA-III address this setting with manually designed selection metrics, but their behavior is largely determined by predefined heuristic rules and hyperparameters. In this work, we propose REP-HO, a reasoning-based evaluation planner that replaces the rule-based mixed-fidelity selection step with a large language model (LLM) planner. The LLM receives the same primitive optimization-state information as the heuristic planner, such as surrogate predictions, uncertainties, evaluation costs, and budget status. We first show that REP-HO achieves competitive performance compared to the human-designed metric-based method (MFE-NSGA-III). We then further enhance each decision with an adaptive nearest-neighbor summary, leading to better and more stable results. We evaluate REP-HO across five heterogeneous regimes covering cost imbalance, constraint difficulty, surrogate fidelity, budget level, and objective conflict. Across these regimes, one of the two variants obtains the best mean ranking score in every regime, REP-HO(Deepseek) is first or second throughout, and the planner shows adaptive allocation behavior, such as prioritizing constraint evaluations under tighter budgets and reallocating constraint evaluation budget when surrogate reliability changes. These results suggest that LLMs can serve as flexible evaluation planners for heterogeneous optimization, offering a general alternative to fixed hand-designed metrics.

Abstract: Community question-answering platforms are important ecosystems for knowledge sharing, yet research on what makes an answer best or a question engaging has often focused on either individual lexical features or broad topics. This exploratory study examines both levels in Yahoo! Chiebukuro, asking which nouns and semantic noun clusters are associated with best-answer selection and question engagement. We analyze a large corpus of questions and answer-tier posts collected under the keyword logistics, using an offline machine-translation pipeline with manually validated noun-level fidelity. Best-answer selection is modeled with conditional logistic regression within question threads, controlling for answer length, order, and question-answer noun overlap. Engagement is modeled in two stages: whether a question receives any response and, conditional on receiving one, how many responses it attracts. Operational logistics nouns such as distribution, warehouse, and center are associated with best-answer selection, whereas broader civic and infrastructure nouns such as car, tax, and shinkansen are associated with higher engagement. At the cluster level, most semantic noun clusters are associated with best-answer selection, while the clusters associated with response likelihood and response volume are largely distinct. These findings reveal differentiated content-outcome profiles across answer and question levels and provide a domain-wide descriptive map of engagement and answer selection in logistics-related cQA discourse.

Abstract: Presolve strongly affects mixed-integer programming (MIP) performance, yet learning-based methods only optimize parameter configurations and cannot express the non-commutative temporal dependencies among actions, whose default order is nearly unique on most domains, yet functionally necessary: artificially shuffling the order of the same sequence inflates the tail of the solve-time distribution by up to several-fold. We recast presolve planning as autoregressive sequence generation over a unified atomic action space, moving the decision object to action sequences; we call this framework ORDO---Operation-level Round-aware Dynamic Ordering for MIP Presolve. Its payoff is cross-domain generalization: on multiple unseen domains it attains end-to-end zero-shot speedup---to our knowledge the first for presolve action sequences---varying by domain and not explained by corpus richness, the strongest domain reaching the largest speedup once racing is added. Deployment uses sequence racing, in which candidate sequences run concurrently and the winner is kept, enabled by an execution-and-observation facility, added by modifying the SCIP source, that injects sequences along the native path and records which actions actually execute and in which round.

Abstract: Pretrained time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are evaluated as forecasters of future values, yet for sparse series many decisions depend only on which future periods contain activity. Standard benchmarks do not assess this. On five sparse datasets, we rank positions within forecast windows that contain both events and zeros. The released point forecasts of 12 TSFMs improve chance-corrected average precision over training-free references by at most 0.031, and in chance-corrected AUC the median TSFM falls below them on every dataset. With event supervision, linear probes of six frozen backbones improve on their backbone's point forecast in 29 of 30 backbone--dataset pairs. Averaging the predicted quantiles instead of taking their median improves the ranking of most TSFMs that forecast the median, and on two datasets the strongest such outputs rival the probes. The probes' advantage over raw-context learners depends on the dataset, and under the same probe, pretrained features outperform randomly initialized ones for five of six backbones. For sparse-event ranking, released point forecasts thus add little over simple references, whereas lightweight event heads on frozen TSFMs rank events better than these forecasts, and the best of them exceed gradient-boosted trees trained on the raw context on three of the five datasets. More broadly, assessing pretrained forecasters on tasks beyond value forecasting requires reporting their outputs, supervised probes of their representations, and raw-context and randomized controls side by side, since each supports a different conclusion.

Abstract: This paper develops a dynamic production-network model in which monetary non-neutrality emerges under fully flexible prices. Firms finance intermediate-input purchases from current nominal balances, and intermediate goods arrive with heterogeneous lead times across suppliers. A monetary shock then has two distinct effects. The first is miscoordination: because production uses dated input bundles assembled under past nominal conditions, the shock disturbs the composition of usable inputs (within and across firms) and thereby generates a deadweight loss. The second is reallocation: because the incidence of the shock is tilted toward smaller firms, which are disproportionately downstream, the shock redistributes resources along the supply chain. More specifically, positive shocks push resources downstream, negative shocks pull them upstream. This means that under a negative shock, both the miscoordination and the reallocation effect reduce downstream output and therefore GDP. Under a positive shock, reallocation raises GDP while miscoordination reduces it. The money-output relation is therefore sign-asymmetric: negative shocks generate sharp contractions, while positive shocks generate at most mild expansions, and sometimes none. Computational experiments on a reconstructed US production network generate output declines after a monetary contraction that are about three times as large as the increases after a monetary expansion.

Abstract: We present reference implementations of four published primal heuristics for mixed-integer programming inside the open-source solver HiGHS (Huangfu and Hall, 2018): Feasibility Jump (Luteberget and Sartor, 2023), fix-propagate-repair (FPR; Salvagnin, Roberti and Fischetti, 2025) with its LP-guided dive-time variant, LocalMIP (Lin, Zou and Cai, 2024), and the first-order-LP feasibility pump Scylla (Mexi et al., 2025). They share one integration interface with per-heuristic budgets and patiences, and each runs in parallel on independently seeded workers. The evaluation is on the mipfeas benchmark (Bussieck and Dirkse, 2026), 233 instances at 600 s, against a separately built unpatched HiGHS on the same machine. The primal integral improves by 23.7% over the full set and by 12.9% on the instances not used for tuning: the patched solver reaches a good solution sooner. At the time limit it is slightly ahead. It finds a solution on 4 instances where the unpatched solver finds none, against 1 the other way, and its final gap is smaller, significantly so only over the full set. Scylla and the LP-guided dive produced no accepted incumbent in any full-limit run that carried them and ship disabled; their implementations remain. The implementation is released as open source.

Abstract: Pharmaceutical sales forecasts inform planning across products, regions, and distribution channels, yet their interpretation depends on inventory availability, transaction semantics, product lifecycle, and the information available when each forecast is issued. A model prediction alone does not preserve these conditions or establish whether a forecast is suitable for operational use. We present Phorecaster365, a human-supervised reference architecture that connects enterprise resource planning data to reviewable pharmaceutical sales forecasts. The architecture separates source ingestion, product-region series construction, temporally valid feature generation, statistical and machine-learning modeling, ensemble formation, uncertainty assessment, planner review, and lifecycle governance. Its central intermediate representation is a forecast context package that preserves the source snapshot, forecast target, temporal cutoff, available covariates, data-quality state, and hierarchy version. A corresponding forecast evidence package links predictions to model and calibration versions, exceptions, human adjustments, and publication history. Development experience with a synthetic panel of 10,950 daily records across 30 product-region series informs the design. Historical experiment summaries are retained only as descriptive evidence of development because their evaluation does not establish independent predictive validity. We specify a rolling-origin evaluation protocol, baseline and ablation requirements, uncertainty and robustness assessments, and a staged pathway from synthetic testing to use in governed planning. The contribution is an implementation-neutral system design and validation framework; the report does not establish real-world forecasting accuracy, comparative superiority, or operational benefit.

Abstract: If AI and automation make reproducible goods cheap, do scarcity rents disappear or migrate? We give a closed general-equilibrium answer that separates a low unit price from economic abundance. Agents consume an automated good, a fixed-supply good, and a numeraire; their purchasing power comes from resource endowments and ownership of scarce assets. The equilibrium of a heterogeneous economy exists, is unique, and is globally stable. Aggregate scarcity rent obeys an exact accounting identity: it rises with automation if and only if real expenditure on the automated good falls. In a symmetric economy this sign is determined by whether the curvature of marginal utility is above or below one. Thus marginal cost converging to zero is insufficient: demand rebound can absorb the released resources. After automated demand is fixed or sufficiently satiated, each agent's access share is an exact convex combination of net purchasing-power and scarce-asset ownership shares. This yields a concentration decomposition with a covariance term, showing why equalizing one asset can increase access inequality when ownership sources were offsetting. A compute extension distinguishes a fixed productive input, whose rent can vanish, from a binding throughput constraint, whose rent persists. Numerical experiments reproduce the sign reversals, ownership effects, and institutional frontiers, and imply eight falsifiable restrictions. The results replace a binary ``post-scarcity'' claim with a testable condition on expenditure, capacity, and ownership.