Article
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Manoj Kumar, D. Kumar, Poonam Saini, Saurabh Pratap
Summary: This paper introduces an integrated Returnable Transport Items (RTIs) and perishable products closed loop green inventory routing problem with uncertain demand and pickup. The simultaneous delivery of perishable products and pick of empty RTIs and perished products is considered. The proposed comprehensive objective function minimizes the sum of inventory, wastage, routing, and emission costs. The exact solution approach (CPLEX) and meta-heuristic approach (Differential Evolutionary algorithm) are used to solve the proposed model. Numerical results are performed to analyze the benefits of heterogeneous fleet and comprehensive objective functions, as well as sensitivity analysis of various factors.
COMPUTERS & INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
(2022)
Article
Management
Carlos Gorria, Mikel Lezaun, F. Javier Lopez
Summary: Accurately estimating key performance indicators in inventory models for perishable items is crucial for evaluating and improving management strategies. This article focuses on the production of platelet concentrates at blood banks under the EWA replenishment policy, providing analytical approximations for important performance measures and demonstrating the applicability of the methodology to similar inventory systems.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Daniele Giovanni Gioia, Leonardo Kanashiro Felizardo, Paolo Brandimarte
Summary: Retail inventory management of perishable items, such as fresh food, is a complex and relevant problem due to the reduction of food waste and potential sales interaction with other item categories. Multiple factors contribute to the complexity, including supply, demand, quality uncertainty, seasonality, consumer behavior, and item substitutions. This study adapts a discrete choice model to represent consumer heterogeneity and uses simulation-based optimization to learn simple ordering rules for two vertically differentiated items to maximize long-term average profit.
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Management
Haijie Zhou, Kebing Chen, Shengbin Wang
Summary: Food waste is a major issue for food marketers and policy organizations worldwide, posing challenges to sustainable development. To address this, a dynamic pricing and inventory decision model is developed for perishable products, considering partial lost sales. The model involves two inventory decisions during the selling season, with the first decision used to detect market information and the second decision to update inventory based on realized demand. The optimal solutions for order quantities and retail prices are derived, revealing the impact of quantity and quality on pricing and reorder quantities.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Management
Fei Fang, Tri-Dung Nguyen, Christine S. M. Currie
Summary: This paper develops a model for dynamic pricing and inventory decisions for multiple substitutable and perishable products under a multiple-period lifetime. By maximizing the total expected profit over the lifetime, optimal order quantities and prices are obtained. Analytical properties of the optimal policy are provided, and experimental results show the benefits of considering pricing and inventory decisions simultaneously for substitutable products.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Kebing Chen, Tiaojun Xiao, Shengbin Wang, Dong Lei
Summary: Our study develops an inventory model for perishable products with a two-period shelf-life and compares the performance of expedited orders and returns in managing inventory risk. We find that expedited orders are better at controlling wastage risk but result in higher shortage risk, while a combination of both plans can optimize inventory management to the fullest extent.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Operations Research & Management Science
Naser Rajabi, Marzieh Mozafari, Ali Naimi-Sadigh
Summary: This paper develops a new bi-level game model for joint pricing and inventory decisions in a competitive supply chain, considering a dominant manufacturer and two follower retailers. The model explores the impact of deterioration rate and price elasticity on equilibrium inventory decisions, and is solved through an exact methodology. A numerical example and sensitivity analyses validate the proposed model's effectiveness in measuring key parameters.
RAIRO-OPERATIONS RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Huali Sun, Suning Sun, Yi Zhou, Yaofeng Xue
Summary: In this paper, the authors address an integrated production-inventory-routing problem for multiple perishable products. They propose two models to evaluate the trade-off between total emissions and total costs, considering carbon emissions and value loss due to deterioration. They introduce constraints to ensure that perishable products are not held, delivered, or used after their lifetimes have expired. The authors devise a PSO-based method to solve the models and conduct computational experiments to validate their effectiveness and rationality. The results provide insights on generating strategies to minimize costs or achieve environmental goals.
COMPUTERS & INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
(2023)
Article
Management
Aldair Alvarez, Pedro Miranda, S. U. K. Rohmer
Summary: This paper introduces the production routing problem for perishable products with fixed shelf life and gradual decay. It formulates the problem as a mixed integer linear program and solves it using a branch-and-cut and a hybrid, iterated local search-based heuristic. The paper analyzes the impact of perishability on the structure of the solutions and explores the significance of different decay rates and transshipments for managing perishability.
OMEGA-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Min Gong, Zhaotong Lian, Hua Xiao
Summary: This study analyses the inventory management strategy for perishables using the (s, S) continuous review inventory policy and the zero-leadtime assumption. A buyback contract is provided and the sales cycle is illustrated using the Markov renewal approach. Closed-form formulas for long-run profit rates are derived and the global optimal (s, S) policy is solved for through numerical studies. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to reveal the effect of different parameters on system behavior.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION ECONOMICS
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Jingsi Huang, Dongwei Xie, Yunzhe Qiu, Jianxiao Wang, Jie Song
Summary: The emergence of renewable energy microgrids (REM)-supported logistics parks reflects the urgent social requirement for sustainability facing energy crisis and climate change. This paper proposes a novel two-stage stochastic optimization method for the emergency REM capacity planning and dynamic inventory operations problem in a REM-supported cold warehouse. The empirical study based on real data in East China demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which can reduce operating costs by 9% on average compared to other heuristic policies and improve the resilience of power systems by 23% and inventory systems by 49%.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Ahmad Ghasemkhani, Reza Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, Yaser Rahimi, Sina Shahnejat-Bushehri, Haed Tavakkoli-Moghaddam
Summary: The present study introduces an integrated production-inventory-routing problem with the objective of maximizing total profit. Two evolutionary algorithms are proposed to solve the problem, and their effectiveness is demonstrated through numerical examples and a real-case study. The computational results show the superiority of the proposed algorithms for this problem.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Management
Can Zhang, Turgay Ayer, Chelsea C. White, Joy N. Bodeker, John D. Roback
Summary: This study investigates the reduction of platelet and perishable product wastage through inventory sharing in a two-location hospital system. The direction of transshipment can be determined by comparing the age of the oldest products at each location. Implementing a myopic transshipment policy can reduce platelet outdates by approximately 20%.
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Economics
Aijun Liu, Qiuyun Zhu, Lei Xu, Qiang Lu, Youqing Fan
Summary: The paper proposes an integrated model of location-inventory-routing for perishable products, taking into account carbon emissions and product freshness. A multi-objective planning model is developed to achieve the lowest economic cost and carbon emissions, and the highest product freshness. The YALMIP toolbox is used to solve the model, confirming the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART E-LOGISTICS AND TRANSPORTATION REVIEW
(2021)
Article
Management
Jinzhi Bu, Xiting Gong, Xiuli Chao
Summary: This paper examines periodic review perishable inventory systems with a fixed product lifetime. The objective is to minimize the long-run average holding, penalty, and outdating cost. The paper demonstrates that a simple base-stock policy can be asymptotically optimal under certain conditions.
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Dariush Tavaghof-Gigloo, Stefan Minner
Summary: This study examines a stochastic capacitated lot-sizing problem and introduces an integrated mixed-integer linear program with service-level constraints. The integrated model sets dynamic safety stocks over replenishment cycles and shows promising performance in various capacity scenarios compared to stochastic dynamic programming and sequential approaches.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Engineering, Manufacturing
Bin Shen, Ciwei Dong, Stefan Minner
Summary: Selling products through retailers with blockchain technology helps combat copycats, increase the profit of brand name companies, enhance consumer awareness, and reduce the profit of imitation products.
PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Josef Svoboda, Stefan Minner
Summary: By proposing a cost-based, multi-dimensional inventory classification scheme, utilizing machine learning classifiers and genetic algorithms to train decision trees, efficient and cost-effective classification decisions for SKUs can be achieved, improving inventory classification efficiency and reducing costs.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Management
Maximiliane Rautenstrauss, Layla Martin, Stefan Minner
Summary: This study investigates the benefits of splitting ambulances to serve infected patients and suspected cases. A two-stage approach is used to evaluate the performance and quantify the benefits, considering the low Covid-related call volume and infection probability.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Manufacturing
Christian Mandl, Selvaprabu Nadarajah, Stefan Minner, Srinagesh Gavirneni
Summary: This study proposes a forward-looking data-driven approach (DDA) for learning trading strategies in storage assets. By incorporating historical data and predicting future profits as feature functions, and enforcing the structural properties of the optimal policy, DDA improves the performance and reduces the generalization error of traditional reoptimization heuristics.
PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Manufacturing
Anna-Lena Sachs, Michael Becker-Peth, Stefan Minner, Ulrich W. Thonemann
Summary: This study analyzes ordering decisions in a multiproduct newsvendor problem with an aggregate service-level constraint. The findings show that manufacturers exhibit similar biases as subjects in laboratory experiments and are prone to a previously unidentified bias called group aggregation. The research also reveals that the manufacturer achieves effective target service levels, but not efficiently.
PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
(2022)
Article
Transportation Science & Technology
Daniele Gammelli, Yihua Wang, Dennis Prak, Filipe Rodrigues, Stefan Minner, Francisco Camara Pereira
Summary: Bike-sharing systems are an efficient alternative transportation mode, and we propose a deep generative model to optimize system efficiency and demand satisfaction. By introducing the VP-RNN model to forecast future pickup and return rates, we highlight the importance of combining decision-making algorithms with learning-based forecasting methods.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART C-EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Industrial
Francesco Zangaro, Stefan Minner, Daria Battini
Summary: This paper investigates the Joint Assembly Line Balancing and Feeding Problem (JALBFP) and proposes a heuristic approach and mathematical model to solve it for multi-manned assembly lines. Through numerical studies, the effectiveness of the heuristic approach is validated, and it is found that the JALBFP method can significantly reduce the overall cost compared to the sequential approach.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Management
Pirmin Fontaine, Stefan Minner, Maximilian Schiffer
Summary: Growing e-commerce delivery leads to increased traffic congestion and the need for efficient city distribution systems. However, balancing sustainability and profitability in city logistics poses a challenge. This study provides a methodological framework for designing city logistics networks with multiple service providers, analyzing different transportation strategies and quantifying the benefits of shipment consolidation. The results show that consolidation and outsourcing can reduce emissions and costs, while a hybrid network with both single- and two-tier strategies is beneficial in heterogeneous city districts.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Economics
Burakhan Sel, Stefan Minner
Summary: Rate volatilities in seaborne freight markets lead to the use of financial agreements like Forward Freight Agreements (FFA) for fixing freight rates in advance. This study proposes a data-driven hedging policy that makes purchasing decisions for FFAs based on comparing FFA rates with future spot rate forecasts. Experimental results show that this policy outperforms point forecast-based policies and benchmark policies, delivering cost reductions ranging from 0.67% to 4.79% against the benchmark policies.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART E-LOGISTICS AND TRANSPORTATION REVIEW
(2022)
Article
Management
Tobias Cronert, Stefan Minner
Summary: Finite games provide a framework for modeling competitive decisions, and we propose a solution method that combines sampling techniques and equilibrium selection theory to determine all equilibria and identify the most probable equilibrium. Our algorithm shows promising performance in various games.
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Management
Alexandre M. Florio, Michel Gendreau, Richard F. Hartl, Stefan Minner, Thibaut Vidal
Summary: This paper examines the stochastic variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) called VRPSD, where demands are only revealed upon vehicle arrival at each customer. The paper summarizes recent progress in VRPSD research and introduces two major contributions: a branch-price-and-cut algorithm for optimal restocking and a demand model for correlated customer demands. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the new algorithm and the potential cost savings of over 10% when considering demand correlation.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Manufacturing
Florian Taube, Stefan Minner
Summary: We examine a single-item inventory model with stochastic demand and periodic review. Fixed order costs are K in the regular order period occurring every m periods, while higher fixed order costs of L>K apply in the intraperiods. Previous research on optimal inventory policies did not consider these time-dependent fixed order costs. By extending current proofs for optimal inventory policies, we fill this gap in inventory theory. The optimal policy is complex in the regular order period, while a period-dependent (s,S) policy is optimal in the intraperiods. We describe and prove this optimal policy based on the concept of K-convexity and the behavior of non-K-convex cost functions.
PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
(2023)
Article
Economics
Daniele Giovanni Gioia, Stefan Minner
Summary: The progress of digitization has made the integration of online and offline sales channels increasingly necessary for retailers. In this study, we propose a dynamic model to jointly optimize allocation and replenishment policies for perishable goods in multi-echelon networks.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART E-LOGISTICS AND TRANSPORTATION REVIEW
(2023)
Article
Management
Tobias Croenert, Layla Martin, Stefan Minner, Christopher S. Tang
Summary: When determining store locations, competing retailers need to consider customers' store choices. Incumbent retailers estimate customer attraction parameters using historical data, while new entrants can observe the location structure of incumbents to estimate these parameters. We propose an inverse optimization approach to help new entrants improve their profits by identifying parameter combinations that lead to observed equilibrium solutions.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
(2024)
