In this paper we address the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem (2E-VRP), an extension of the classical Capacitated VRP, where the delivery from a single depot to the customers is managed by routing and consolidating the freight through intermediate depots called satellites. We present a family of Multi-Start heuristics based on separating the depot-to-satellite transfer and the satellite-to-c...

Inventory is lifeblood in an organization. Multiechelon inventory of Olympia paper mill, Khyber Pakhtonkhwa is optimized by efficient management of the organizational supply chain (SC). A supply chain is designed starting from raw material receiving from supplier up to finished good delivered to the customer. The on-going setup of the selected organization is traditional based on the experience...

Inventory control is a crucial activity for many companies. Given the recent advances in information technology, there have never been greater opportunities for coordinated inventory control across supply chain facilities. But how do we design efficient control methods and policies that take advantage of the detailed information that is now becoming available? This doctoral thesis investigates ...

Given stock allocation in an inventory system, it is necessary to do reallocation periodically to address inventory imbalance and maximize availability. In this paper, we allow two opportunities to perform reallocation within a replenishment cycle. We derive a mathematical model to dynamically determine when to reallocate and how to reallocate. Experimental results show that multiplereallocatio...

Supply chain management (SCM) is an emerging field that has commanded attention and support from the industrial community. Demand forecast taking inventory into consideration is an important issue in SCM. There are many diverse inventory systems, in theory or practice, which are operated by entities (companies) in a supply chain. In order to increase supply chain effectiveness, minimize total c...

Consider a supply chain in which a product must pass through multiple sites located in series before it is finally delivered to outside customers. Incentive problems may arise in this system when decisions are delegated to corresponding site managers, each maximizing his/her own performance metric. From the overall system’s point of view, the decentralized supply chain may not be as efficient a...

The research in this paper is motivated by a real life spare parts networks for complex technical systems in oil refining sector. At the customers the availability of the installed technical systems often is essential for the primary process. Hence, they require a high availability. For improve the management of the spare parts inventory the main company (the customer) has developed a new strat...

This paper considers a two-echelon capacitated supply chain with two non-identical retailers and information sharing. We characterize the optimal inventory policies. We also study the benefits of the optimal stock rationing policy over the first come first served (FCFS) and the modified echelon-stock rationing (MESR) policies. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper explores the differences between demand and supply uncertainty in multi-echelon supply chains. Our central premise is that the insights gained from the study of one type of uncertainty often do not apply to the other. In fact, the two types of uncertainty are in a sense mirror images of each other, in that the optimal strategy for coping with supply uncertainty may be exactly opposit...