Cross docking is a logistics strategy that strives to reduce inventory holding costs, shipping costs, and delays in delivering the products. In this research, an optimization model is presented for split loading and unloading products by suppliers and customers, vehicle routing with fuzzy possibilistic time window constraints among them, assignment of vehicles to cross dock, consolidation and i...

A pickup and delivery vehicle routing problem from a realworld bottled-beverage distribution company is addressed. The problem consists of deciding how to load every trailer, how to configure the vehicles in terms of the trailers, and how to route the vehicles, so as to minimize routing and fixed costs. The problem includes several features such as time windows on both customers and vehicles, m...

Computer-mediated classrooms coupled with heightened emphasis on removing geographic limitations have led to growing dependence on asynchronous learning networks as a delivery medium. An increasingly robust body of literature suggests both positive and negative implications of knowledge delivery using this medium. However, much less is known about the implications of this delivery method relati...

We consider the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (VRPSD) on tree structured networks with a single depot. The problem we are concerned with in this paper is to find a set of tours for the vehicle with minimum expected length. Every tour begins at the depot, visits a subset of customers and returns to the depot without violating the capacity constraint. Randomized approximation al...

From perhaps a few hundred practitioners in 1996 to an estimated 30,000 today, the discipline called hospital medicine has shown remarkably rapid growth. It represents a fundamental separation of the inpatient and outpatient components of internal and family medicine. The split has implications for the quality and efficiency of care delivery, the outlook for the physician workforce, and the dev...