Publication Date
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
James Hamister (Committee Member), Pratik Parikh (Advisor), Xinhui Zhang (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Master of Science in Engineering (MSEgr)
Abstract
Distribution networks often manage products with varying life-cycles, where demand for some products is relatively stable throughout the year (basic products) and the demand for others is short-lived (fashion products). Beyond the coordination of inventory and transportation decisions, decisions at the warehouse must be considered as its resources are frequently shared by both product classes simultaneously. For this two-product class distribution planning problem, we focus on characterizing three real-world distribution strategies observed in industry and evaluating them based on total distribution cost and warehouse measures (e.g., workforce plan and workload variation) against a benchmark ILS-based heuristic. Experimental results suggest that there are in fact strategies in industry that under specific system configurations may provide competitive solutions compared to the benchmark heuristic on large problem instances (e.g., 200 stores, 1000 products, 28 days). Several managerial insights are derived to compare such distinct warehouse strategies and the corresponding impact on the network.
Page Count
52
Department or Program
Department of Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2015
Copyright
Copyright 2015, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may be modified only if the modified version is distributed with these same permissions.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
