70 research outputs found
Multi-donor trust fund for sustainable logistics (MDTF-SL) : position note on green logistics (supply chains)
Logistics – the services, knowledge, and infrastructure that allow for the free movement of goods and people – is now recognized as a key driver of competitiveness and economic development. Efficient logistics systems are a precondition for regions, countries, cities, and businesses to participate in the global economy, boost growth, and improve livelihoods. Policy making has turned its attention to sustainable growth paths, valuing scarce resources, minimizing environmental impacts, and allowing economies to prosper across generations. In this new integrated vision of development, sustainable logistics is a key nexus.
To improve sustainable logistics practices in the developing world, private sector technologies and innovations, as well as governmental policies and academic knowledge, need to be brought together. The government of the Netherlands and the World Bank have taken a first step in this direction and established the first Multi-Donor Trust Fund for Sustainable Logistics (MDTF-SL) in September 2013
Dual sourcing in the age of near-shoring: trading off stochastic capacity limitations and long lead times
\u3cp\u3eWe model a periodic review inventory system with non-stationary stochastic demand, in which a manufacturer is procuring a component from two available supply sources. The faster supply source is modeled as stochastic capacitated with immediate delivery, while the slower supply source is modeled as uncapacitated with a longer fixed lead time. The manufacturer's objective is to choose how the order should be split between the two supply sources in each period, where the slower supply source is used to compensate for the supply capacity unavailability of the faster supply source. This is different from the conventional dual-sourcing problem, and motivated by the new reality of near-shoring options. We derive the optimal dynamic programming formulation that minimizes the total expected inventory holding and backorder costs over a finite planning horizon and show that the optimal policy is relatively complex. We extend our study by developing an extended myopic two-level base-stock policy and we show numerically that it provides a very close estimate of the optimal costs. Numerical results reveal the benefits of dual-sourcing under near-shoring, where we point out that in most cases the manufacturer should develop a hybrid procurement strategy, taking advantage of both supply sources to minimize its expected total cost.\u3c/p\u3
Reaching 50 million nanostores : retail distribution in emerging megacities
With urbanization sprawling in emerging economies, retail opportunities abound. City structures, income distributions, and shopping patterns in emerging megacities are however very different from the ones we know from developed markets. One of the most dominant characteristics is the presence of millions of very small, family-owned and operated stores. We call these nanostores . In this paper, we define and characterize these nanostores, and the associated logistics and channel strategies to reach them as the next opportunity in global retailing. We argue that structures and characteristics are fundamentally different of the developed economies organized big-box retail, and hence new research opportunities can be identified
Green facility location
Transportation is one of the main contributing factors of global carbon emissions, and thus, when dealing with facility location models in a distribution context, transportation emissions may be substantially higher than the emissions due to production or storage. Because facility location models define the configuration of deliveries, green location models become an important alternative to reduce CO2 emissions in logistics.\u3cbr/\u3eThis chapter presents a variety of green location models that include the estimation of carbon emissions. It also provides basic guidelines in understanding these models in comparison with cost minimization models
Modelling and simulation
Quantitative modelling has been the basis of most of the initial research in operations, labelled as operational research in Europe, and was the basis of initial management consulting and operations research in the US. Initially, quantitative modelling in operational research was orientated very much towards solving real-life problems in OM rather than towards developing scientific knowledge. Later however, especially in the US, a strong academic research line in operations research emerged in the 1960s, working on more idealized problems and thus building scientific knowledge in OM. During that same period, much of this research lost its empirical foundations, and research methods have been primarily developed for these more or less theoretical research lines, leaving the more empirically orientated research lines for more than 30 years in the blue with regard to research methodology
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