About me

I am a Ph.D. student in Industrial and System Engineering at the University of Southern California since 2022 Fall. My research advisor is Prof. Maged M. Dessouky. I received my master’s degree at Columbia University in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University and was a visiting student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My previous supervisors were Prof. Sharon Di, Prof. Weifei Hu, and Prof. Xin Wang. Click here to view my up-to-date resume. If you want to know more about me, please feel free to contact me (wzhao009@usc.edu).

RESEARCH INTEREST

My research interest lies in developing models and algorithms leveraging operations research and machine learning for sequential decision-making problems in transportation and supply chain management. I regard answering the following question as my academic goal: how to design learning-based approaches for large-scale systems so that they can outperform traditional, optimization-driven methods? Overall, my research interests include

Methodology. Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning, Stochastic Programming, Integer Programming

Application. Transportation, Supply Chain Management

PUBLICATIONS

Journal

• Weifei Hu, Wentao Zhao, Yeqing Wang, Zhenyu Liu, Jin Cheng, Jianrong Tan, Design optimization of composite wind turbine blades considering tortuous lightning strike and non-proportional multi-axial fatigue damage, Engineering Optimization. doi

PAPERS UNDER REVIEW

• Wentao Zhao, Yikang Hua, Xin Wang, Energy-sponge Electric Vehicle Sharing System Design. (Under 3rd round review at Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technology)

Working Papers

• Wentao Zhao, Maged Dessouky, Closed-Loop Supply Chain Network Design and Operations for Electric Vehicle Battery.
• Wentao Zhao, Maged Dessouky, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Electric Vehicle Sharing Relocation.

Conference

• Wentao Zhao, Yikang Hua, Xin Wang, Energy-sponge Service in Electric Vehicle Sharing System, Transportation Research Board 2021. (Poster) POST

• Weifei Hu, Wentao Zhao(Presenter), Yeqing Wang, Zhenyu Liu, Jianrong Tan, Reliability Analysis of Wind Turbine Blades Considering Lightning Strike, North America Wind Energy Academy WindTech 2019 Conference. (Presentation) PPT doi

PRESENTATIONS

• Wentao Zhao, Maged Dessouky, “Dynamic Closed-Loop Supply Chain Network Design and Operations for Electric Vehicle Battery,” INFORMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, October 2024.
• Wentao Zhao, Maged Dessouky, “A Two-Stage Distributed Learning-Based Framework for Dynamic Electric Vehicle Sharing,” INFORMS Annual Meeting, Phoenix, AZ, October 2023.
• Wentao Zhao, Yikang Hua, Xin Wang, “Energy-sponge Service in Electric Vehicle Sharing System”, Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Virtual, 2021.