The dynamic transportation problem is a transportation problem over time. That is, a problem of selecting at each instant of time, the optimal flow of commodities from various sources to various sinks in a given network so as to minimize the total cost of transportation subject to some supply...

The truck plant of General Motors of Canada produces 60 trucks/hour, 2 shifts/day, in a highly automated factory employing 3200 people. Flow in the paint shop is prone to bottlenecks when there is a large ratio of Two-tone to Monotone jobs. (Two-tone jobs require a second pass through the paint...

Shipment consolidation is a logistics strategy that combines two or more orders or shipments so that a larger quantity can be dispatched on a same vehicle. This paper discusses a discrete-time Markovian decision process (MDP) approach for determining when to release consolidated loads. We assume...

It is well appreciated by logistics professionals that combining several small orders into one larger load can reduce the total transportation cost to the shipper. Logistics specialists all recognize that such a decision to consolidate must take into account the shipper’s increased inventory...

A second Toronto airport has been proposed off-and-on for the past decade. The adequacy of the present runway system is studied for the important case of all aircraft operating on a single runway. Air traffic projections were inputs to a time-dependent model with separate queues for landings and...

"Just-in-Time" (JIT) inventory systems are currently very popular in practice and in the operations management literature. These writings have generally assumed that all shipments are done by motor freight. We feel, however, that this assumption can be misleading. The main thrusts of a JIT...

"Just-in-Time" (JIT) inventory systems are currently very popular in practice and in the operations management literature. These writings have generally assumed that all shipments are done by motor freight. We feel, however, that this assumption can be misleading. The main thrusts of a JIT...

One usually thinks of logistics as an “outbound” activity, e.g. the physical distribution of finished products from factory to warehouse to retailer. A firm’s Logistics Information System (LIS) would thus generally be designed to support these outbound shipments. However, when a...