This paper studies spare part transshipments between two service part facilities whose demands are correlated. Transshipments are used to reduce severity of part stock outs. Facilities are run by an inventory manager (IM) who minimizes replenishment, transshipment, and inventory costs. We show that the optimal transshipment policy is an inventory hold-back type; if the part inventory at a facil...

In modern rail-rail transshipment yards huge gantry cranes spanning all railway tracks allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains. This way, multiple trains loaded with cargo for varying destinations can be consolidated to a reduced number of homogeneous trains, which is an essential requirement of hub-and-spoke railway systems. An important problem during ...

between the first origin and the last destination. Many shipments travel by longer, less direct routes. Most available data on commodity shipments within a single country identify the first origins and the last destinations but not any transshipment points along the way. The Commercial Vehicle Survey, provided by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, Canada, proved to have particularly use...

Solving transshipment problems to optimality is difficult, unless several simplifying hypotheses are assumed (such as unit-sized customer demands and replenishments, negligible replenishment lead time, etc.). For this reason, some heuristics have been recently proposed in order to provide rules, which incorporate relevant factors of the problem, to find conditions under which it makes sense to ...

We consider a multi-location inventory system where inventory choices at each location are centrally coordinated. Lateral Transshipments are allowed as recourse actions within the same echelon in the inventory system to reduce costs and improve service level. However this transshipment process usually causes undesirable lead times. In this paper, we propose a multiobjective model of the multi-l...

The rise of the Internet has revolutionized the manner in which retailers operate. The early stages of the dot com era allowed businesses to experiment with different business models. Internet retailers focused on front-end activities, overlooking the importance of back-end operations such as supply chain management. Retailers have the option to distribute their products via the traditional met...

We investigate the hardness of approximating a transshipment problem with a permutable transit vector. We have already known that the transshipment problem of minimizing the total shipping cost is NP-hard. In this paper, we prove that even if the unit shipping cost associated with every arc is given as a positive integer, there is no polynomial time constant factor approximation algorithm for t...

In this research, we apply a discrete event simulation approach to explore how enterprises in the Chinese mainland make a successful operation with the aid of e-commerce. This paper examines the effects of proposed four kinds of transshipment operation network structures on the performance under different policies of transshipment and inventory allocation. Results show that: 1) transshipment ba...

In multi-location inventory systems, transshipments are often used to improve customer service and reduce cost. Determining optimal transshipment policies for such systems involves a complex optimisation problem that is only tractable for systems with few locations. Consequently simple heuristic transshipment policies are often applied in practice. This paper develops an approximate solution me...