The research objective of this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) collaborative research award was to optimize distribution planning for modern day supply chains through their warehouses that deal with distinct product classes. The key question we focused on addressing was, “would proactively incorporating warehousing decisions (workforce and technology) during the planning stage reduce inefficiencies at the operational level?” To address this question, we proposed the warehouse-inventory-transportation problem (WITP), a new integrated problem in the supply chain literature and industry practice that would allow for joint evaluate of three key distribution network drivers, warehouse, inventory, and transportation decisions. We developed a variety of optimization models and algorithms that systematically evaluated the interaction between warehouse, inventory, and transportation decisions for one product class for a deterministic demand, extended this to a two-product class and proposed a sophisticated algorithm to solve industry-sized problems (200+ stores and 1000+ products), and then considered stochastic demand for this specific cases leading to a two-stage stochastic integer quadratically-constrained programming. The key features of these novel models that consider both workforce planning and technology decisions are the warehouse, in conjunction with inbound and outbound transportation and inventory at warehouse and stores. Because of the ability of our algorithms to solve industry-sized problems, we were able to derive several, relevant, practical insights. We incorporate into the problem demand uncertainties associated with both short and long life-cycle products flowing through the warehouse.

The impact of this research can be far-reaching. There are over 600,000 warehouses across thousands of supply chains in the US alone, with annual expenditures of over $100 billion. We have already been disseminating our findings with top food, apparel, and grocery distributors in the US, which has furthered our engagement with those companies in an effort to improve their supply chains. One of the products of this research, a dashboard tool, was implemented at our industry partner’s warehouse. A web-based educational tool that can help both academic faculty and students, and industry practitioners, was hosted on our lab website and disseminated via listservs. Five graduate students were partially funded on this grant and contributed at various stages in the research; 2 PhD and 3 MS. This helped enhanced their written and oral communication skills, their professionalism through interactions with industry co-PIs, and their ability to handle complex problems and find elegant and relevant solutions. While 1 graduated PhD student is already contributing towards the US economy as a Sr Operations Research Analyst, another PhD student recently graduated and serves as an adjunct instructor. Among the 3 MS students, one is working in the Silicon Valley, the other stayed back for his PhD to work on a recently funded NSF grant, and the third MS student is considering pursuing a PhD as well. Findings of this research have now been integrated into our undergraduate and graduate curriculum on supply chain. Our next step would be to explore the translation of these research findings towards commercialization.

Project website (web and desktop tool): http://cecs.wright.edu/research/daol/witp

Last Modified: 12/04/2016
Modified by: Pratik J Parikh