Abstract:
This dissertation reports on three integrated supply chain problems that incorporate several key components of modern supply chains, including location, transportation, inventory, and customer selection. The first part of the dissertation investigates a multi-product, three-stage distribution system with transshipment and direct shipping from supply centers to customers. The objective is to determine the locations of a fixed number of capacitated warehouses to minimize the total transportation and fixed facility costs in the supply chain network. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the integrated location-inventory problem in a multi-retailer newsvendor setting with both decentralized and centralized decision making. The third part of the dissertation explores the coordination between operations management and marketing through an integration of marketing strategies and the inventory decisions to maximize the total expected profit of the company. The contribution of this dissertation is four-fold: First, we define two new problems with respect to integrated decision making in supply chain management: one combines inventory and location decisions based on two designs of supply chain network, and the other one studies the interface of operations management and marketing on top of a selective newsvendor problem with quantity dependent lead time. For both problems, we offer mathematical models and effective solution approaches. Second, we develop two meta-heuristic solution approaches for a multi-product production/distribution system design (PDSD) problem, which has been studied in literature and solved with Scatter search and Tabu search. We propose to solve the problem with two meta-heuristic procedures, simulated annealing (SA) and greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), which demonstrate better solution quality and time performance compared to Scatter Search. Third, we establish a practical connection between operations and marketing in the selective newsvendor problem. This effort demonstrates that a joint decision-making process is more profitable, and opens up more cooperation opportunities between the two disciplines. Lastly, the proposed mathematical models, solution approaches, as well as managerial insights for either new problems or existing problems will potentially shed light on the research of problem variants and the development of new techniques beyond those considered in this dissertation.
