The dangers of accidental freezing of vaccines in the cold chain have prompted studies throughout the globe to better characterize the risk. To date, there has been no systematic review of these studies. This analysis highlights that accidental freezing is pervasive and occurs across all segments of the cold chain. Between 14% and 35% of refrigerators or transport shipments were found to have e...

The ENCOAL Corporation has shipped, to two utility customers, over, 500 rail cars (six partial trains and two full trains) of solid product’(PDF) from its plant located at Triton Coal Company’s Buckskin Mine near Gillette Wyoming. Shipments span a range of blends from 15% to essentially unblended PDF. Utility handling of these shipments is comparable to that of run-of-mine Buckskin coal. Result...

The consolidation of shipments into loads arises in a number of applications, including household moving, truckload trucking, rail and container operations. The capacitated clustering problem (CCP) is one of the underlying optimization problems for the efficient consolidation of customer orders to vehicle shipments. In this paper we develop optimization-based heuristic algorithms for the CCP, e...

In this paper, we develop a supply chain network design (SCND) model considering both strategic and operational decisions. The model determines plant and DC locations as well as product shipments among components of network regarding single sourcing and capacity of plants and distribution centers (strategic level) while the shipments have to wait in the queue for transporting from plants to DCs...

Using novel, high-frequency data on political strikes in Bangladesh, we examine the impact of political violence on firm-level export activity. Our data cover the universe of political strikes and export transactions in Bangladesh during 2010 to 2013. Using an event-study approach, we find that there is a 16.26 percent reduction in the baseline probability of exporting on the day of a strike. M...

Hub location problems are strategic network planning problems. They formalise the challenge of mutually exchanging shipments between a large set of depots. The aim is to choose a set of hubs (out of a given set of possible hubs) and connect every depot to a hub so that the total transport costs for exchanging shipments between the depots are minimised. In classical hub location problems, the un...

We consider a multi-item spare parts optimization problem with multiple warehouses and two customer classes, where lateral transshipments are used as a differentiation tool. Specifically, premium requests that cannot be met from stock at their preferred warehouse may be satisfied from stock at other warehouses (so-called lateral transshipments). We first derive approximations for the mean waiti...