1,041 research outputs found

    Proactive model to determine information technologies supporting expansion of air cargo network

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    Shippers and recipients expect transportation companies to provide more than just the movement of a package between points; certain information must be available to them as well, to enable forecasts and plans within the supply chain. The transportation companies also need the information flow that undergirds a transportation grid, to support ad-hoc routing and strategic structural re-alignment of business processes. This research delineates the information needs for an expanding air cargo network, then develops a new model of the information technologies needed to support expansion into a new country. The captured information will be used by shippers, recipients, and the transportation provider to better guide business decisions. This model will provide a method for transportation companies to balance the tradeoffs between the operating efficiencies, capital expenditures, and customer expectations of their IT systems. The output of the model is a list of technologies – optimized by cost – which meet the specific needs of internal and external customers when expanding air cargo networks into a new country

    Supply chain management: An opportunity for metaheuristics

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    In today’s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require heavy emphasis on integration of activities, cooperation, coordination and information sharing throughout the entire supply chain, from suppliers to customers. To be able to respond to the challenge of integration there is the need of sophisticated decision support systems based on powerful mathematical models and solution techniques, together with the advances in information and communication technologies. The industry and the academia have become increasingly interested in SCM to be able to respond to the problems and issues posed by the changes in the logistics and supply chain. We present a brief discussion on the important issues in SCM. We then argue that metaheuristics can play an important role in solving complex supply chain related problems derived by the importance of designing and managing the entire supply chain as a single entity. We will focus specially on the Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search and Scatter Search as the ones, but not limited to, with great potential to be used on solving the SCM related problems. We will present briefly some successful applications.Supply chain management, metaheuristics, iterated local search, tabu search and scatter search

    Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods for sustainable transportation in Smart Cities

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    L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

    Last-mile logistics optimization in the on-demand economy

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    L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

    Dynamic vehicle routing problems: Three decades and counting

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    Since the late 70s, much research activity has taken place on the class of dynamic vehicle routing problems (DVRP), with the time period after year 2000 witnessing a real explosion in related papers. Our paper sheds more light into work in this area over more than 3 decades by developing a taxonomy of DVRP papers according to 11 criteria. These are (1) type of problem, (2) logistical context, (3) transportation mode, (4) objective function, (5) fleet size, (6) time constraints, (7) vehicle capacity constraints, (8) the ability to reject customers, (9) the nature of the dynamic element, (10) the nature of the stochasticity (if any), and (11) the solution method. We comment on technological vis-à-vis methodological advances for this class of problems and suggest directions for further research. The latter include alternative objective functions, vehicle speed as decision variable, more explicit linkages of methodology to technological advances and analysis of worst case or average case performance of heuristics.Š 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

    Analytical model for large-scale design of sidewalk delivery robot systems

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    With the rise in demand for local deliveries and e-commerce, robotic deliveries are being considered as efficient and sustainable solutions. However, the deployment of such systems can be highly complex due to numerous factors involving stochastic demand, stochastic charging and maintenance needs, complex routing, etc. We propose a model that uses continuous approximation methods for evaluating service trade-offs that consider the unique characteristics of large-scale sidewalk delivery robot systems used to serve online food deliveries. The model captures both the initial cost and the operation cost of the delivery system and evaluates the impact of constraints and operation strategies on the deployment. By minimizing the system cost, variables related to the system design can be determined. First, the minimization problem is formulated based on a homogeneous area, and the optimal system cost can be derived as a closed-form expression. By evaluating the expression, relationships between variables and the system cost can be directly obtained. We then apply the model in neighborhoods in New York City to evaluate the cost of deploying the sidewalk delivery robot system in a real-world scenario. The results shed light on the potential of deploying such a system in the future
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