In today’s market, sales promotional schemes have spun out to be essential for promoting outfits. Nonetheless, due to the sudden ascent in sales, the subsequent demand uncertainty calls for the high flexibility in supply chains. The present work examines the barriers to flexibility in the Indian automobile supply chains under such an environment from a sustainability viewpoint, an indispensable element

The main objective of a maintenance policy consists of conducting maintenance actions at lower costs. This paper proposes an approach for comparing numerically three maintenance strategies, involving minimal repairs at failure, replacement with complete renewal only at the first failure, and replacement with complete renewal at each failure. These strategies are integrated into a modified block replacement

Supply networks (SNs) play a vital role in fuelling trade and economic growth. Due to their interconnectedness, firm-level disruptions can cause perturbations to ripple through SNs, magnifying initial impact. Contemporary research on ripple effects focussed on understanding various structural features of SNs to predict and control disruption propagation. Our work adds to this body of knowledge by analysing

Reducing energy consumption in the energy-intensive production systems is of great significance and attracts more and more attention. Although a lot of efforts have been devoted to formulate and solve the energy consumption optimisation problem in the Bernoulli serial lines, existing methods for solving the problem in long Bernoulli lines either cannot obtain the optimal solution or are time-consuming

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the problem of disassembly lot-sizing for the single-product type. Due to some specific characteristics of disassembly systems, surplus inventory can be generated while satisfying the demand for the components. Disposal decisions are considered here to avoid inventory accumulations throughout the planning horizon. Three new mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulations

This paper investigates a retailer’s quality information acquisition and ordering decisions in the presence of risk aversion. We formulate a newsvendor model and derive the retailer’s optimal order quantity under two scenarios, one with and one without quality information acquisition, by minimising expected risk based on the CVaR criterion. Then, we compare the optimal ordering quantities and the profits

ABSTRACT The deterioration of fresh products is often severe during fresh product delivery in urban areas, which is a significant challenge. We propose a novel model for the urban delivery of fresh products with different perishability. The objective of this model is to minimise the total deterioration value (TDV) and distance travelled. The TDV is related to the perishability, deterioration rates

ABSTRACT This paper models a single liner service design and operations problem. The model selects the ports to be included, their sequence, the sailing speed of vessels, the number of vessels and the amounts of cargo to transport by the service. The objective is to maximise profit. First, a relaxation with a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulation is proposed. We show how to obtain

ABSTRACT We examine a ripple effect in prehospital stroke care processes. Stroke patient care in prehospital stages is provided by emergency medical services (EMS). We divide EMS processes into three segments: dispatcher, field provider service without a patient (i.e., en route to the patient scene), and field provider service with a patient (i.e., transporting the patient to a hospital). We use both

ABSTRACT This paper provides a literature review and an analysis of the studies related to workforce reconfiguration strategies as a part of workforce planning for various production environments. The survey demonstrates that these strategies play a crucial role in the resilience and flexibility of manufacturing systems since they help industrial companies to quickly adapt to frequent changes in demand

The concept of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) is a current subject that has attracted intensive research. This latter covers the entire RMS life cycle, from the design to the exploitation phase, and includes several important problems requiring the use of optimisation. The objective of this paper is to survey research publications related to RMS optimisation problems and their solution

To understand how retailer competition affects supply chain partners’ operational and financial decisions under guarantee credit financing (GCF), we examine a supply chain system composed of a capital-constrained retailer, a capital-abundant retailer and a manufacturer in the presence of substitutable product competition. By identifying the strategic interaction among the retailers and the manufacturer

ABSTRACT This paper examines market entrance and pricing strategies for a remanufacturer with capital constraint and competition from an original equipment manufacturer. In the study, the remanufacturer is divided into two types, namely the H-type and L-type, and is assumed to have access to bank loans and equity financing to ease the capital constraint. With the Nash game, it is found that (i) if

ABSTRACT We construct a supply chain to investigate the reason why it is uncommon for the traditional retailer to function as the pre-warehouse of the online retailer. The product only offered by the traditional retailer is labelled as the differentiated product, while the product supplied by both the traditional retailer and the third-party suppliers is called the common product. As the online retailer'

ABSTRACT The fourth industrial revolution is increasingly implemented in most fields and categories of industry. The use of several highly developed technologies generates huge amounts of heterogeneous data and knowledge, hence the need to manage it in order to facilitate its reuse. This article proposes a global approach of knowledge management, from the analysis and development of the knowledge base

This paper investigates an integrated scheduling problem of production and outbound distribution with flexible vehicle departure time in a time-sensitive make-to-order supply chain. We develop a hybrid multi-level optimisation framework by decomposing the problem into three sub-problems, including vehicle assignment, parallel machines scheduling and distribution scheduling. In this framework, we propose

Many periodic review inventory studies make the simplifying assumption that orders do not crossover, that is, that they are delivered in the same sequence as they were issued. In many real-life situations, however, long international shipping routes result with frequent crossovers. Accordingly, we investigate a periodic review inventory system with backlogged compound Poisson demand in which order

ABSTRACT It is challenging to forecast total sales of short life-cycle products due to a lack of historical sales data. Multi-source information combination methods make it possible to depict different kinds of characteristics and features, given a limited volume of samples. Evidence theory is a common approach used for multi-source combinations. This paper proposes a new method, named ‘Multi-Evidence

This article analyses the competitive priorities underlying manufacturing location initiatives in developed economies. Specifically, building on secondary data, we compare and contrast manufacturing backshoring from China by companies headquartered in developed economies (308 cases) and Chinese foreign direct investment to developed economies (155 cases). Results suggest that both types of initiatives

ABSTRACT Nowadays cross-docking operations play a significant role in the cold-chain logistics. This paper addresses the cold-chain cross-docking truck scheduling problem where two types of products, i.e. refrigerated and frozen ones, demand separate trucks and storage areas with distinct temperature settings during their storage and transportation. We present a mixed-integer linear programming model

This paper studies a two-agent scheduling problem on mixed batch machines in parallel. A mixed batch machine can process several jobs simultaneously as a batch, as long as the number of jobs in the batch does not exceed the machine capacity. The processing time of a mixed batch is the weighted sum of the maximum processing time and the total processing time of jobs in the batch. The objective is to

Production research literature and industry practice have started to pay increasing attention to the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) phenomenon. Scholars and practitioners identified a strong link between this paradigm and the well-known Lean Production (LP) paradigm. Most studies consider LP as a prerequisite of I4.0 and I4.0 as a tool to overcome LP limits and boost its practices. However, so far, these effects

Air-jet weaving is one of the most efficient manufacturing processes for producing textile fabrics. During weft insertion, a yarn brake influences the quality of textile fabrics significantly. This brake is set up manually by a machine operator and the duration of the set-up process depends essentially on his experience. Furthermore, an inappropriate braking process might induce high tension in the

ABSTRACT While blockchain technologies are gaining momentum within supply chains, academic understanding of concrete, real-life design and implementation is still lagging, hence offering very limited insights into the true implications of blockchain technology on supply chains. This paper reports a two-year design science research (DSR) study of a smart contract initiative piloted by a consortium in

ABSTRACT In this study, a multi-period contingent sourcing model for sustainable sourcing is developed to mitigate the ripple effect caused by supply disruption. In this model, the manufacturer's main supplier is a recycled materials supplier who is subject to random disruptions and whose materials have setup time uncertainty. His backup supplier is a virgin materials supplier who is reliable. We investigate

Assembly line balancing is an important and well recognised operations research problem. The current line balance may not stay optimal, even feasible, due to the disruptions in one or more workstations. In this study, after the disruption, we aim to rebalance the assembly line by considering the trade-off between workload balancing (fairness measure) and total replacement distance for the tasks assigned

Despite the importance of supply chain learning for competitiveness, little is known about how to enable such learning. This study empirically investigates the impact of information sharing on different types of supply chain learning (internal, supplier, and customer learning) and their influences on flexibility performance. Grounded in absorptive capacity theory, we use structural equation modelling

ABSTRACT Revenue sharing contracts (RSCs) have gained considerable popularity over the past two decades—particularly among prominent platform distributors such as the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon— and have therefore attracted a great deal of research attention in the domain of supply-chain management. This study is the first to review the literature dealing with RSCs, a literature in which

Visually inspecting integrated circuit (IC) wire bonding defects is important to ensuring the product quality after the packaging process. The availability of IC X-ray images offers an unprecedented opportunity of studying the image-based automatic IC wire inspection. In this paper, a data-driven method consists of data pre-processing, feature engineering, and classification is developed to address

ABSTRACT In developing countries, farmers lack capital for market-oriented production and information for making informed production and sales decisions. To alleviate poverty, many enterprises, such as JD Finance, have developed crowdfunding poverty alleviation initiatives for poor farmers. In this mode, although enterprises provide a crowdfunding platform for farmers to raise production funds, farmers

We consider an Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) model with imperfect quality items. All the items undergo a quality screening process for which both the cost and the defect detection rate depend on the time devoted to this operation. Contrary to most previous research in the field, the speed of screening is taken as a decision variable in the presented model jointly with the order quantity. Additionally

While many supply chain decisions could take advantage of big data, firms struggle with investments into supply chain analytics since they are not able to assess the application areas and benefits of these initiatives. In this paper, we provide a multi-level perspective to assess the value of supply chain data. We develop a framework that highlights the connections between data characteristics and

This paper studies whether and how a manufacturer can mitigate the effects of demand uncertainty during production ramp up by jointly managing inventory and capacity development, determined by the productivity of a heterogeneous workforce. One way the manufacturer can direct its capacity development is by recognising that workers become more productive as they gain experience when making scheduling

Product configuration involves selecting common components/modules of individualised products. This is done according to customer requirements under mass customisation. However, the strategies adopted by most existing product configurators are often extreme, with either total diversity (mass personalisation) or standardised products (a limited set of products). In order to investigate the intermediate

Successful bidding involves defining relevant technical bid solutions that conform to the customers' requirements, then selecting the most interesting one for the commercial offer. However, in Engineer-To-Order (ETO) industrial contexts, this selection process is complicated by issues of imprecision, uncertainty and confidence regarding the values of the decision criteria. To address this complexity

This paper investigates the value of the flexibility created by the transportation options in mitigating supply chain transportation risks. We accomplish this aim by developing an innovative computational model which uses the Real Option Valuation method to model the inner flexibility mechanism of the transportation options to choose between the Safety Net carrier and the spot market carrier on the

Flowshop scheduling methods that appear in the literature assume that products are processed in either batch mode or cyclic mode. In batch mode, a product starts after another product is completely processed. On the other hand, in cyclic mode, products are run in mixed mode with unit transfer. In this paper, a new scheduling method, the batch-cyclic scheduling method, is proposed to schedule the products

Digital twin (DT) is a core technology that enables the integration among physical machines, tools, material handling and warehousing, and real-time manufacturing decisions. In this study, a DT framework is proposed for the real-time monitoring of conventional machines to connect isolated machines to an interconnected system and monitor machine conditions in real-time. We implement a DT for a die cutting

The simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP) considers work division among different workstations of a serially arranged assembly process to maximise its efficiency under workload (cumulative) and technological (precedence) constraints. In this work, we consider a variant of the SALBP which allows parallel workstations. To study the effect of parallel stations, we propose a new problem (the parallel

Operating rooms (ORs) account for a significant proportion of the costs of maintaining a hospital. Surgery scheduling is optimised to reduce the costs in ORs. However, an important issue that directly affects surgery scheduling is often neglected, i.e. surgeon collaboration. In reality, a surgery requires two surgeons: the main surgeon and an assistant. The surgeon of one surgery might be assigned

In the OCP phosphate supply chain, source ores (SOs) are extracted according to a tactical extraction programme, constrained by geological conditions that constantly limit and modify the variety of available SOs. Then SOs are blended to get merchantable ores (MOs) respecting composition constraints and ordered by internal (phosphoric acid plant) or external (export) customers. The blending process

We use hotelling model to analyse store brands as a strategy for B&M (brick-and-mortar) retailers to combat showrooming. We investigate how national-brand product mismatch and store-brand awareness affect supply chain’s performance. We reach four major conclusions. First, store-brand strategy may be an effective means for B&M stores to mitigate showrooming. However, it’s better to introduce premium

There is a need for the dairy supply chain to improve its environmental performance. Intermodal rail-road transportation can be a way to reduce CO2 emissions. However, despite technological innovations in the realm of cooling technology, which could enable a shift to intermodal transportation, the use of intermodal rail-road in the dairy supply chain is still low. A blueprint is needed to foster the

Three-dimensional (3D) optical systems have been recently deployed for the assessment of 3D topography of finished products during manufacturing processes. Although the 3D topographic data contain rich information about the product and manufacturing processes, existing monitoring approaches are incapable of capturing the complex characteristics between the topographic values, which makes them ineffective

Compared with non-renewing warranty, renewing warranty is more attractive to the customers. To reduce the possible cost pressure of the manufacturers, this study proposes a novel two-stage renewing warranty model with a threshold of maintenance times. Based on a preset allocation ratio, the warranty period is divided into two stages, i.e. the renewing warranty stage and the minimal repair warranty

Stochastic scheduling has received much attention from both industry and academia. Existing works usually focus on random job processing times. However, the uncertainty existing in job release times may largely impact the performance as well. This work investigates a stochastic parallel machine scheduling problem, where job release times and processing times are uncertain. The problem consists of a

In the cold rolling process of steel strip products, strip breakage is an undesired production failure which can lead to yield loss, reduced work speed and equipment damage. To perform a root cause analysis, conventional physics-based approaches which focus on mechanical and metallurgical principles have been applied in a retrospective manner. With the advancement of data acquisition technologies,

Enterprise captures market share from competitors through brand advertising and increases consumer demand for this category of products through general advertising. In this paper, considering a supply chain with a manufacturer who is responsible for generic advertising and a retailer who undertakes brand advertising, a Stackelberg differential game-theoretic model is established to examine the impact

This research addresses a vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery with time windows from multiple depots (MVRPSPDTW) over a time horizon in the B2C e-commerce logistics system. We consider an e-commerce logistics system with a multi-period, which consists of customers, logistics service providers (LSPs), suppliers, and a decision-making platform. A mixed-integer non-linear programming

Crane scheduling tasks in steelworks are a matter of uncertainty scheduling with certain probability distribution pattern. To better schedule tasks with this feature, this paper proposes a Dynamic Area Allocation (DAA)-based crane scheduling model according to the following steps. First, Bayesian network, according to the time sequence of crane transportation tasks, is constructed. Then, conditional

Given that a U-shaped assembly line is usually regarded as a serial flow production system, preventive maintenance (PM) on machines in any station of the line may lead to stoppage of the whole line and sequentially cause great loss of production cost. To improve production continuity during PM, this paper proposes multiple alternative assignment plans with interchangeable abilities to ascertain the

Process monitoring of multivariate quality attributes is important in many industrial applications, in which rich historical data are often available thanks to modern sensing technologies. While multivariate statistical process control (SPC) has been receiving increasing attention, existing methods are often inadequate as they are sensitive to the parametric model assumptions of multivariate data.

With city logistics becoming more and more important, increasing attention has been paid to the ‘last-mile delivery’ in urban areas. We investigate a novel crowdsource-enabled integrated production and transportation scheduling problem in the paper. The problem is first formulated into a mixed-integer linear program and its strong NP-hardness is proved. To better understand this complex problem, two

We consider a spare parts inventory system controlled by a base-stock policy. We assume several demand classes, where the demands of each class follow a compound Poisson process, and a stochastic replenishment lead-time common to all classes. For this inventory system, we investigate two rationing policies that can be employed when the inventory level is critically low. The first policy is the reservation

Reverse supply chains (RSC) may provide the benefits of reducing pollution, creating new jobs, and generating income from the recyclable materials. However, their implementation comes with risks and hardly predictable outcomes. The model presented in this paper aims to help managers to better evaluate risks and opportunities while deciding on the RSC design to manage the reverse flow of end-of-life

Enhancing the proactive strategic capabilities to withstand the most unfavourable circumstances is always appreciated as a long-term policy rather than incident-based responses. The present research is positioned on this fundamental notion of supply chain risk management with a particular focus on strategic capabilities like reliability and flexibility that often conflict with cost. Accordingly, the

Machine learning methods are widely used for rolling bearing fault diagnosis. Most of them are based on a basic assumption that training and testing data are adequate and follow the same distribution. However, for bearings working under multiple working conditions, dynamic changes are inevitable and labelled vibration data are usually insufficient. To deal with the issues, a new fault diagnosis method

The rapid development of urbanisation and the ever-changing consumers’ demands are constantly changing the urban logistics industry, imposing challenges on logistics service providers to improve customer satisfaction which is one of the indicators for the sustainability of urban logistics. Existing customer satisfaction evaluations are based on a questionnaire survey, which is time-consuming and labour

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling independent jobs on identical parallel machines with a single server to minimise the makespan. We propose mixed integer programming (MIP) formulations to solve this problem. Each formulation reflects a specific concept on how the decision variables are defined. Moreover, we present inequalities that can be used to improve those formulations. A computational

Optimal fixture configuration is critical to minimise the machining distortion of the workpiece. This study presented an approach for optimisation of fixturing configuration in flexible machining fixtures. Herein, a flexible fixture system composed of adaptive clamping unit, locating unit, and auxiliary locating unit was investigated. Response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to describe the