Michael

Michael Yan-Jia ZHAO

 Center for Intelligent and Networked System (CFINS)
 Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 100084
 Telephone: +86-10-62792491 (Lab)
 Email: zhaoyj@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
 MSN: michael_zyj@hotmail.com

Education:

Ph.D. Candidate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 2005.9 -- now.

   Major in System Engineering, Optimization and Scheduling of Complex Systems
   Advisors: Prof. Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho, Harvard; Prof. Xiaohong Guan, Qianchuan Zhao, 

Tsinghua

Bachelor of Sciences:

   2001.9 -- 2005.7, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Experiences:

Project: Co-operation Project between CFINS and General Motors Corporate USA, 2006.3

-- now.

   Efficient Research on Simulation and Optimization for Material Handling in assembly 

line.

Intern: IBM China Research Lab (CRL), Beijing, 2006.6 -- 2006.11

   Optimization research in Supply Chain Management and Logistic

Intern: Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited (TH-UNIS), Beijing, 2004.7-- 2004.9.

   Automatic Design for Modern Architecture

Social work: minister of the Academic Section in Graduate Student Union, Tsinghua,

2006.9 -- now.

IEEE student member: 2006.1 -- now.

Research Interests:

Performance Evaluation and Optimization of Complex Systems

Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (DEDS) are wide-existed systems in the world. In practice,

many man-made systems can be modeled as DEDS, such as manufacture system, communication

network, and transportation system. This kind of systems is driven by events and cannot be

described through differential equations. We can only evaluation the performance through

simulation. Thus, it is a practical and valuable research direction to combine the

simulation and optimization effectively. My current research is based on schedule problem in

manufacture system.

Stochastic Optimization

Optimization through simulation can be modeled into stochastic optimization. In other words,

the objective function and the constraints relate to some stochastic variables, which

furthermore can only be observed through simulation and the probability characteristic of

which is unknown. Prof. Xi-Ren CAO and Prof. Yu-Chi HO developed Perturbation Analysis (PA)

in 1980s, which helps to extract the gradient information from one simulation. Prof. Ho

developed Ordinal Optimization (OO) in 1990s, which helps to lessen the computation burden

in stochastic optimization through exponential convergence of the order and goal softening.

My current research efforts are mainly focused on the perturbation analysis and its

combination with Markov decision processes (MDP), event-based optimization, and schedule

problem in manufacture system.