In the United States there is an emerging trend to ship goods by rail directly from ports to inland intermodal traffic terminals. However, for this trend to succeed shippers must have “visibility” into rail shipments. In this research we seek to provide visibility into shipments through optimal placement of sensor and communication technology. We formally define the notion of visibility and the...

This paper reports the results of a study performed for the Oregon Department of Energy. The objectives of the study were to characterize the range of radioactive material shipments through the state and to determine the worst radiological hazards which might arise if these shipments were involved in transportation accidents. The direct and indirect radiological hazards were analyzed for worst ...

In today’s global free market, third-party logistics providers (3PLs) are becoming increasingly important. This paper studies a problem faced by a 3PL operating a warehouse in Shanghai, China, under contract with a major manufacturer of children’s clothing based in the United States. At the warehouse, the 3PL receives textile parcel shipments from the suppliers located in China; each shipment i...

Based on detailed shipping figures for Suriname’s main harbour in Paramaribo, we estimate the total shipments (in kilograms) of original and falsified medical products for 1996–2008 across five product categories. Using various time series techniques and diffusion models, we document that total cumulative shipments of falsified products make about 40% of total shipments. We observe that there a...

An important service provided by third-party logistics (3PL) firms is to manage the inbound logistics of raw materials and components from multiple suppliers to several manufacturing plants. A key challenge for these 3PL firms is to determine how to coordinate and consolidate the transportation flow, so as to get the best overall logistics performance. One tactic is to establish consolidation h...

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 the dynamic version of the classic problem of allocation of inventories to a set of retailers to rectify the imbalance of inventories amongst them. While most research is focussed on analyzing different allocation strategies with a predetermined time of shipment (static policy), we investigate the benefit of using real time demand (inventory) information to schedule rebalancing ship...

A three-ton shipment of dry shark fins was examined by German customs in 2017 leading to the confiscation 405 kg potential CITES species. We analyzed a subsample this material (115 specimens) using DNA sequence-based identification and compared results morphological screening found mixture regulated (4 11 species) unregulated Our demonstrate difficulties identifying species morphologically larg...

We consider the problem faced by an airline that is flying both passengers and cargo over a network of locations on a fixed periodic schedule. Bookings for many classes of cargo shipments between origin-destination pairs in this network are made in advance, but the weight and volume of aircraft capacity available for cargo as well as the exact weight and volume of each shipment are not known at...