An Integrated Shipment Planning And Storage Capacity Decision: A Simulation Study

In a transportation and distribution system, the shipment decisions, fleet capacity, and storage capacity are interrelated in a complex way, especially when uncertainty of the demand rate and shipment lead time are taken into account. In this paper the effect of various factors on total costs and service level of a distribution system are investigated. The objective is to obtain a better policy related to a number of issues in transportation and distribution under uncertain situation and to obtain insights on which factor affect the performance significantly. This research develops a simulation model that mimics transportation and distribution of bulk cement by the use of ships in a large cement company in Indonesia. The system consists of a storage at the depot and storage at two port of destinations, which then referred to as packing plants. Several numbers of scenario related to storage capacity at port of origins as well as port of destinations, number of ships employed, operating hours of ports, and rules for ship dispatching are then developed. Each scenario is evaluated in terms of shipment costs and service level. A factorial experiment has been conducted and ANOVA has been used to analyze the results. The results suggest that all factors have significant effects on both total costs and service level. However, the use of different number of ships appear to have the most substantial impacts on those two performance measures. It is also observed that a strong correlation exists between total costs and service level and an efficient frontier of cost and service level has been presented. This paper brings an important recommendation to the company as well as insight for maritime logistics in general. Cost is a very important competitive factor for bulk items like cement, and thus the proposed scenarios could be implemented by the company for substantial transportation and distribution cost reduction. In addition, the efficient frontier graph resulted from this study can be used as an internal target or performance benchmark

An integrated shipment planning and storage capacity decision under uncertainty: a simulation study

Purpose – In transportation and distribution systems, the shipment decisions, fleet capacity, and storage capacity are interrelated in a complex way, especially when the authors take into account uncertainty of the demand rate and shipment lead time. While shipment planning is tactical or operational in nature, increasing storage capacity often requires top management’s authority. The purpose of this paper is to present a new method to integrate both operational and strategic decision parameters, namely shipment planning and storage capacity decision under uncertainty. The ultimate goal is to provide a near optimal solution that leads to a striking balance between the total logistics costs and product availability, critical in maritime logistics of bulk shipment of commodity items. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use simulation as research method. The authors develop a simulation model to investigate the effects of various factors on costs and service levels of a distribution system. The model mimics the transportation and distribution problems of bulk cement in a major cement company in Indonesia consisting of a silo at the port of origin, two silos at two ports of destination, and a number of ships that transport the bulk cement. The authors develop a number of “what-if” scenarios by varying the storage capacity at the port of origin as well as at the ports of destinations, number of ships operated, operating hours of ports, and dispatching rules for the ships. Each scenario is evaluated in terms of costs and service level. A full factorial experiment has been conducted and analysis of variance has been used to analyze the results. Findings – The results suggest that the number of ships deployed, silo capacity, working hours of ports, and the dispatching rules of ships significantly affect both total costs and service level. Interestingly, operating fewer ships enables the company to achieve almost the same service level and gaining substantial cost savings if constraints in other part of the system are alleviated, i.e., storage capacities and working hours of ports are extended. Practical implications – Cost is a competitive factor for bulk items like cement, and thus the proposed scenarios could be implemented by the company to substantially reduce the transportation and distribution costs. Alleviating storage capacity constraint is obviously an idea that needs to be considered when optimizing shipment planning alone could not give significant improvements. Originality/value – Existing research has so far focussed on the optimization of shipment planning/scheduling, and considers shipment planning/scheduling as the objective function while treating the storage capacity as constraints. The simulation model enables “what-if” analyses to be performed and has overcome the difficulties and impracticalities of analytical methods especially when the system incorporates stochastic variables exhibited in the case example. The use of efficient frontier analysis for analyzing the simulation results is a novel idea which has been proven to be effective in screening non-dominated solutions. This has provided the authors with near optimal solutions to trade-off logistics costs and service levels (availability), with minimal experimentation times

SAnE: Smart Annotation and Evaluation Tools for Point Cloud Data

Addressing the need for high-quality, time efficient, and easy to use annotation tools, we propose SAnE, a semiautomatic annotation tool for labeling point cloud data. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) we propose a denoising pointwise segmentation strategy enabling a fast implementation of one-click annotation, (2) we expand the motion model technique with our guided-tracking algorithm, and (3) we provide an interactive, yet robust, open-source point cloud annotation tool, targeting both skilled and crowdsourcing annotators. Using the KITTI dataset, we show that the SAnE speeds up the annotation process by a factor of 4 while achieving Intersection over Union (IoU) agreements of 84%. Furthermore, in experiments using crowdsourcing services, SAnE achieves more than 20% higher IoU accuracy compared to the existing annotation tool and its baseline, while reducing the annotation time by a factor of 3. This result shows the potential of SAnE, for providing fast and accurate annotation labels for large-scale datasets with a significantly reduced price. SAnE is open-sourced at https://github.com/hasanari/sane.publishedVersio

SAnE: Smart Annotation and Evaluation Tools for Point Cloud Data

Addressing the need for high-quality, time efficient, and easy to use annotation tools, we propose SAnE, a semiautomatic annotation tool for labeling point cloud data. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) we propose a denoising pointwise segmentation strategy enabling a fast implementation of one-click annotation, (2) we expand the motion model technique with our guided-tracking algorithm, and (3) we provide an interactive, yet robust, open-source point cloud annotation tool, targeting both skilled and crowdsourcing annotators. Using the KITTI dataset, we show that the SAnE speeds up the annotation process by a factor of 4 while achieving Intersection over Union (IoU) agreements of 84%. Furthermore, in experiments using crowdsourcing services, SAnE achieves more than 20% higher IoU accuracy compared to the existing annotation tool and its baseline, while reducing the annotation time by a factor of 3. This result shows the potential of SAnE, for providing fast and accurate annotation labels for large-scale datasets with a significantly reduced price. SAnE is open-sourced at https://github.com/hasanari/sane