Service Quality, Consistency, and Equity in Stochastic and Dynamic Distribution Networks

In our contemporary era, the role of logistics, which deals with the flow of goods, information, and services, as one of the pillars of the modern and globally interconnected supply chain has become more and more important. In a logistics system, transportation is one of the decision areas which has a huge impact on the overall performance of the system. The rapid increase in urbanization and technological advancement has made the management of transportation systems more complex. Decisions such as route planning have become multifaceted. The amount of cost saved or profit made has been the traditional metric for evaluating the performance of a transportation system. While this is still true, there are other factors that are intangible but have an impact on costs or profits and consequently, on the performance and sustainability of the system in the medium or long term. Such metrics include service quality, consistency, and equity.

In the context of single- and multi-echelon distribution networks of goods and agricultural produce, this project looks into the decision-making processes of pickup and delivery problems that take into account these three metrics in presence of uncertainty and dynamism in the availability of data . Solution strategies are suggested as a combination of stochastic programming/modeling techniques and combinatorial optimization methods.