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...

General Motors of Canada is undertaking a multimillion-dollar modernization of its Oshawa, Ontario assembly plant. Automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) and a substantial amount of robotics and other automation will be used in the body-framing area. We developed a computer simulation model to...

Expert systems (ES) have produced much excitement in recent years. Because a great deal of experience and knowledge are captured in the ES, there may be no need to consult a specialist for every decision in the given area. A properly designed expert system thus has in its knowledge base a wide...

Quantity discounts are a useful mechanism for coordination. Here we investigate such discounts from the supplier's perspective, both from a non-cooperative game-theoretical approach and a joint decision model. Taking into account the price elasticity of demand, this analysis aids a sole supplier...

This paper considers inventory models of the order-quantity/order-point type, or (Q,r) models. In general the control parameters (Q and r) depend on both the demand process and the replenishment lead time. Although many studies have treated lead time as constant, focusing solely on demand, a...

The processing time of large orders is, in many industries, longer than that of small orders. This renders supply lead times in such settings to be increasing in the order size. Yet that pattern is not reflected in existing inventory control models, especially those allowing for random lead...

This paper addresses a hub-and-spoke network problem for railroad freight, where a central planner is to find transport routes, frequency of service, length of trains to be used, and transportation volume. Hub-and-spoke networks, often found in air freight, have not been favoured by railways in...

This article studies the dispatch of consolidate shipments. Orders arrive to a depot at discrete time epochs following a discrete time batch Markov arrival process (BMAP). The weight of an order is measured in discrete units and may be correlated with the arrival time. As soon as the total...

Although it is an essential link in any supply chain, transportation is often neglected in inventory decisions. In reordering decisions, for example, this omission may well result in unexpected losses, as transportation and quantity discounts can be tricky. In this paper, we study the problem of...