BACKGROUND Many developing countries increasingly recognize and acknowledge family planning as a critical part of socio-economic development. However, with few health dollars to go around, countries tend to provide essential drugs for curative care, rather than for family planning products. Donors have historically provided free contraceptives for family planning services. Whether products are ...

Logistics planning in disaster response phase involves dispatching commodities such as medical materials, personnel, food, etc. to affected areas as soon as possible to accelerate the relief operations. Since transportation vehicles in disaster situations can be considered as scarce resources, thus, the efficient usage of them is substantially important. In this study, we provide a dynamic vehi...

Rapid increasing logistics demands call for high efficiency delivery in cities. Effective city planning of distribution centers is crucial. This paper first analyzes the current situation and constraint of Shanghai distribution centers. Then investment proposal is made for Shanghai distribution center relocation. The facility site selection and layout plan are proposed, and the commitment is ca...

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning (Sacerdoti 1974) is an approach to planning where problem-specific knowledge is used to remedy the computational intractability of classical planning. This knowledge is in the form of task decomposition directives, i.e. the planner is given a set of methods that tell it how a high-level task can be decomposed into lower-level tasks. The HTN planning prob...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been widely used in supporting the logistics management on manufacturing shopfloors where production resources attached with RFID facilities are converted into smart manufacturing objects (SMOs) which are able to sense, interact, and reason to create a ubiquitous environment. Within such environment, enormous data could be collected and used for support...

In logistics, questions as “Where is my container?” and “When does my container arrive?” can often not be answered with sufficient precision, which restricts the ability of logistics service providers to be efficient. Since logistics is complex and often involves multiple transportation modes and carriers, improving efficiency and saving costs in the supply chain requires communication between ...

Logistics encompasses the business processes that plan, control, and implement the flow of goods and related information between points of origin and points of consumption to meet customer demand. It does so by managing transportation, warehousing, and inventory decisions across the company and, whenever possible, across its supply chain. Traditionally, logistics decisions have been driven by m...

This demonstration showcases TRIPS, The Rochester Interactive Planning System, an intelligent, collaborative, conversational planning assistant. TRIPS collaborates with the user using both spoken dialogue and graphical displays to solve problems in a transportation logistics domain. In our demonstrations, users are encouraged to sit down and try the system, with only rudimentary guidance from u...

This article demonstrates the implementation and integration of a web-based service for the visualization of simulation models and their dynamics within the scope of logistics education at universities. Therefore, a survey of applications of visualization in simulationbased analysis of logistic systems as well as the utilization of web-based services in logistics planning is given. Both the tec...