| dc.description.abstract | Recent supply chain literature and practice recognize that significant cost savings can be achieved by coordinating inventory and transportation decisions. Although the existing literature on analytical models for these decisions is very broad, there are still some challenging issues. In particular, the uncertainty of demand in a dynamic system and the structure of various practical transportation cost functions remain unexplored in detail. Taking these motivations into account, this dissertation focuses on the analytical investigation of the impact of transportation-related costs and practices on inventory decisions, as well as the integrated inventory and transportation decisions, under stochastic dynamic demand.
Considering complicated, yet realistic, transportation-related costs and practices, we develop and solve three classes of models: (1) Pure inbound inventory model impacted by transportation cost; (2) Pure outbound transportation models concerning shipment consolidation strategy; (3) Integrated inbound inventory and outbound transportation models. In broad terms, we investigate the modeling framework of vendor-customer systems for integrated inventory and transportation decisions, and we identify the optimal inbound and outbound policies for stochastic dynamic supply chain systems.
This dissertation contributes to the previous literature by exploring the impact of realistic transportation costs and practices on stochastic dynamic supply chain systems while identifying the structural properties of the corresponding optimal inventory and/or transportation policies. Placing an emphasis on the cases of stochastic demand and dynamic planning, this research has roots in applied probability, optimal control, and stochastic dynamic programming. | en |
