Design and management of networks with fixed transportation costs
(2010)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Semal, Pierre
- Abstract
- (en) Reusable packages are logistic items used for the shipments of goods from a producer to its customers and which, once the goods have been consumed by the customers, are to be returned to the producer. This doctoral thesis addresses the strategic design and the operational management of large independent reverse networks for their return flows when fixed transportation costs apply. At the strategic level, we identify the economic logic by which the allocation of the customers should be made and the optimal shipment sizes determined. We then deal with the issues of the size of the fleet of reusable packages and of the use and locations of intermediary facilities. We further discuss the impacts of having a standard fleet of packages when compared to a heterogeneous fleet and of capacity limits on transportation. At the operational level, we tackle the problem of the coordination of the flows. Our main contribution is to show that, in large granular networks, finding very good solutions to this problem is relatively easy and natural. We suggest a myopic heuristic procedure to solve this problem and derive lower bounds on the optimal cost. We also evaluate the cost impact of using a discrete review policy instead of a continuous policy and we finally discuss the impact of variability and lead times in transportation. Although the insights are derived for reverse networks, the assumptions used in this thesis are relatively general. The models could easily be applied on delivery networks or integrated forward and reverse networks.
- Affiliations
Citations
Lange, J.-C. (2010). Design and management of networks with fixed transportation costs. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/131095