The way we perceive the world is changing, at least in how we deal with information. According to a December 2014 Deloitte survey, nearly 90 percent of us check our phone in the first hour of being awake, and 23 percent of us look at our phone up to 50 times a day. Information is bombarding us at a pace that would’ve overwhelmed our grandparents and even our parents, thanks to mobile devices, computers, signage everywhere, advertising in countless forms, in-car displays, wearables, consumer appliances and now the fast-expanding Internet of Things.
Investing in resilience beyond traditional risk management can deliver long-term operational, financial, and competitive advantages, turning adaptive capacity into a strategic asset for future-ready supply chains. In today’s world of persistent supply chain disruption—including pandemics, trade wars, traditional wars, and intensifying natural disasters—resilience has become a primary topic in supply...
Managers at small and midsize businesses may perceive automation as too expensive to be feasible, but research has identified strategies that make implementing it possible even on a tight budget. A framework for evaluating the five main factors that can reduce — or increase — the cost of an automation...
Teaming humans with robots delivers better results for warehouse operations than having only robots, but there are opportunities to improve that collaboration in the face of increasing demands for speed and accuracy in e-commerce fulfillment. Studies have shown that having a mix of humans and robots can lead to greater...
AI is revolutionizing supplier negotiations, driven by the need for speed, scalability, and strategic agility in complex supply chains. Initially used for automating low-value tasks, AI can now play a crucial role in a growing number of key procurement decisions. The transition to adopting AI for supplier negotiations should be...
Consumer-facing firms often seek outsourcing services from third-party providers to reduce costs and focus on their core competencies. We consider a scenario where a single service provider offers outsourcing services to two firms through different service modes: the dedicated mode and the shared mode. With the dedicated mode, the service...
This study explores nanostores’ identity—micro, independent grocery retailers through a systemic, stakeholder-informed lens to promote their survivability and competitiveness. Moving beyond traditional operational descriptions, it introduces a multidimensional framework that examines what nanostores do (X), how they do it (Y), and why they matter (Z), complemented by the TASCOI tool...
The sponsor company, a global consumer goods enterprise known for high-quality products and customer service, has been on a digital transformation journey over the past few years to make its supply chain more responsive. Currently, the company manages its end-to-end supply chain planning using Mixed Integer Linear Programming-based (MILP) software...
Procurement teams often struggle to fully leverage the valuable supplier knowledge captured during RFx (Request for Information, Proposal, or Quotation) events, mainly due to the high volume of unstructured data and fragmented data storage, which limits access to past insights. This paper explores how generative AI can preserve, retrieve, and...
This capstone project evaluates the environmental impact of autonomous drone-based inventory automation in a U.S. fulfillment warehouse operated by a global logistics company. The central research question is: What is the impact of warehouse inventory automation on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across Scope 1, 2, and 3? To address this...
The evolution of retail supply chains into multi-echelon, omni-channel networks has made efficient inventory management increasingly critical, particularly in the grocery sector. Amid this transition, our sponsor—a leading U.S. grocery retailer—is shifting from localized inventory control to a globally optimized strategy and seeks to understand the value of dynamic Multi-Echelon...
The U.S. full dry-van truckload (FTL) industry serves as a primary channel through which goods move across the country, forming the essential backbone for all product categories and commodity groups. Following the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, the truckload industry was deregulated and became increasingly influenced by market dynamics. Since...
This study develops a discrete-event simulation model using open-source software to analyze import container flows through the Port of New York/New Jersey. The simulation integrates parameters from extensive data analysis of vessel arrivals, container dwell times, and intermodal transfers. Data is sourced from multiple public sources including vessel GPS data...
The New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) poses a major risk to fuel distribution infrastructure across the central U.S., where disruption could severely limit fuel availability during an emergency. This project, developed in partnership with the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab, analyzes downstream fuel supply under earthquake conditions using operational flow...
Recent disruptions to global supply chains – from the COVID-19 pandemic to shifting tariff policies – have prompted companies to reevaluate their operational strategies. This capstone provides a practical, evidence-based framework to help organizations build or transition toward more resilient, sustainable, and community-oriented supply chains. Through methodical case study analysis...
Our sponsor seeks to transform negotiation into a data-driven process while preserving institutional knowledge of category sourcing strategies. To support this goal, we developed the Negotiation Buddy, an intelligence tool designed to help sourcing professionals identify key negotiation levers and generate effective counteroffers. The tool integrates sourcing practices such as...
The growing complexity of procurement operations at a leading pharmaceutical company has led to an overload of dashboards, increasing reporting inefficiencies and limiting data-driven decision-making. To address these challenges, our project explores how Generative AI (GenAI) and automated data visualization can optimize procurement analytics. We developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) chatbot...
In large companies, inbound logistics is often managed independently by different business divisions. This fragmented approach leads to repetitive pickups at suppliers, inefficient route planning, underutilized vehicles, and high transportation costs. This capstone, developed in collaboration with a multinational industrial company, proposes two distinct methodologies: (i) locate optimally located consolidation...
Reverse logistics plays a vital role in the construction and mining equipment industry, where managing product returns efficiently is critical for both cost optimization and sustaining dealer satisfaction. This project conducts a financial analysis of the current reverse logistics process for a leading industry player, focusing on the adequacy of...
On December 11-12, 2024, the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab held a workshop in Cambridge, MA with industry, academic, non-profit and government stakeholders to discuss fuel supply chains in the 2024 hurricane season and establish a foundation for developing a fuel response playbook for future disasters.
This report summarizes the key discussions and takeaways, operational challenges faced in recent hurricanes, best practices, and important concepts to form the foundation of a fuel response playbook in future disasters.
On January 29, 2025, the Supply Chain Analysis Network (SCAN), American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN), and the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab (HSCL) held a workshop in Memphis, TN with industry, academic, and government stakeholders to discuss the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) as a “Wicked Problem”: that is, a “class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.” This report summarizes the key discussions, insights, and action items from this workshop which focused on building resilience, supply chain disruption, and emergency response coordination. The workshop brought together professionals from multiple sectors, including food supply, fuel distribution, freight logistics, and emergency management, to address the coordination challenges associated with catastrophic events such as the NMSZ and other large-scale disruptions in both the Midwest US and the rest of the country.
MIT’s Warehouse of the Future Initiative develops research on highly automated, interconnected warehouses. This work highlights five major disruptions—cyberattacks, outages, sabotage, technology failures, and accidents—along with 26 vulnerabilities that threaten highly automated warehouse operations. Reliance on cloud-based systems and Robotics-as-a-Service expands the cyberattack surface, while advanced hardware like Autonomous Mobile Robots introduces new safety and operational complexities. To build resilience, businesses should develop robust cybersecurity measures, enhance workforce training, and create effective risk mitigation strategies. This includes improving technology evaluation, vendor management, and system integration, supported by strong security standards that guard against attacks on suppliers.
Motivation To enable vehicle automation to negotiate in a mixed traffic environment there is a need for formal methods that describe the communication process between drivers and pedestrians. Aim This work aims to model the underlying states of communication that a dyad of a pedestrian-driver system experiences when a pedestrian...
On 6 – 7 November 2024, the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) hosted a roundtable titled “Approaching Zero Emission Trucking: Challenges and Opportunities.” Facilitated by the MIT FreightLab and the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab, the roundtable brought together some 30 stakeholders, including motor carriers, shippers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, and government experts, as well as researchers from CTL for productive and wide-ranging discussions. Participants shared their thoughts on identifying, measuring, and managing Scope 3 emissions; emission-reduction strategies, including zero-emission (ZE) trucking solutions; and the risks and challenges of implementing emission-reduction initiatives. They also identified potential research topics that would provide value to their organizations and industries.
We study the effect of using high-resolution elevation data on the selection of the most fuel-efficient (greenest) path for different trucks in various urban environments. We adapt a variant of the Comprehensive Modal Emission Model (CMEM) to show that the optimal speed and the greenest path are slope dependent (dynamic)...
