Time Series Supplier Allocation via Deep Black-Litterman Model

Time Series Supplier Allocation (TSSA) poses a complex NP-hard challenge, aimed at refining future order dispatching strategies to satisfy order demands with maximum supply efficiency fully. Traditionally derived from financial portfolio management, the Black-Litterman (BL) model offers a new perspective for the TSSA scenario by balancing expected returns against insufficient supply risks. However, its application within TSSA is constrained by the reliance on manually constructed perspective matrices and spatio-temporal market dynamics, coupled with the absence of supervisory signals and data unreliability inherent to supplier information. To solve these limitations, we introduce the pioneering Deep Black-Litterman Model (DBLM), which innovatively adapts the BL model from financial roots to supply chain context. Leveraging the Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNS), DBLM automatically generates future perspective matrices for TSSA, by integrating spatio-temporal dependency. Moreover, a novel Spearman rank correlation distinctively supervises our approach to address the lack of supervisory signals, specifically designed to navigate through the complexities of supplier risks and interactions. This is further enhanced by a masking mechanism aimed at counteracting the biases from unreliable data, thereby improving the model's precision and reliability. Extensive experimentation on two datasets unequivocally demonstrates DBLM's enhanced performance in TSSA, setting new standards for the field. Our findings and methodology are made available for community access and further development.