A typical retailer carries 10,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs). However, these numbers may exceed hundreds of millions for giants such as Walmart and Amazon. Besides the volume, SKU data can also be high-dimensional, which means that SKUs can be segmented on the basis of various attributes. Given the data volumes and...
Decision-making in supply chains is challenged by high complexity, a combination of continuous and discrete processes, integrated and interdependent operations, dynamics, and adaptability. The rapidly increasing data availability, computing power and intelligent algorithms unveil new potentials in adaptive data-driven decision-making. Reinforcement Learning, a class of machine learning algorithms, is one...
This work is about sustainability-related learning experiences for the discipline of supply chain management (SCM) in Higher Education. It arises from the need to motivate students with relevant and interesting activities to improve their learning performance. Higher Education must respond to dynamic demands to keep impactful topics for students, organizations...
This research explores the sustainability of street markets to grant access to fruits and vegetables (F&Vs) to underserved communities in emerging economies. Specifically, this paper studies the impact of adding new street markets to satisfy the demand of end consumers in a real case. To do so, we developed a...
A field operational test assessed visual-manual disengagement when driving with adaptive cruise control (ACC) relative to manual driving. Ten volunteers drove instrumented vehicles on public roads for 4 weeks, using the vehicles as they would their own. To study change over time, the 4-week trial was divided evenly into two...
Tesla auto lane change is a feature within Autopilot (AP) – a collection of automated driving features designed to assist the driver with automatic steering and adaptive cruise control. In order to determine how drivers engage in maneuvers performed automatically by AP, 5,154 manual and automated lane change events along...
This paper explores a holistic approach to understanding the impacts of on-road factors on continuous driver-automation interaction in naturalistic environments. We processed and synchronized CAN Bus signals, GPS coordinates, and high-definition videos collected from two drivers in 98 trips (~97 hours) involving Tesla Autopilot engagement collected over three years as...
In Peru, the traditional channel dominates with a 70% of market share; however, the modern channel and other organized retail chains (e.g., convenience stores) have been growing in recent years in the retail landscape. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic represented a new challenge for retailers due to the mobilization restrictions that...
Uno de los principales retos que trajo consigo la pandemia de COVID-19 fue dar continuidad a la educación. En ese contexto, este trabajo se enfoca en la práctica de la educación superior en la disciplina de Ingeniería y sus programas académicos afines con una perspectiva a futuro, motivado por las...
The 2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge, hosted by Amazon.com’s Last Mile Research team, and scientifically supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, prompted participants to leverage real operational data to find new and better ways to solve a real-world routing problem. In this...
If there is one characteristic that sums up the state of supply chains today it is the need to navigate extreme change. Our research over the last three years culminating in the 2022 State of Supply Chain Sustainability Report shows the same can be said for supply chain sustainability (SCS). SCS is a moving target.
Firms’ (shippers’) procurement of truckload (TL) transportation services is a costly, time-intensive process. The result of these months-long procurement events is typically thousands of contracts between the shipper and transportation service providers (carriers) covering each of the shipper’s lanes (origin-destination pairs) over which it distributes products. Due to TL supply and demand uncertainty, shippers often adopt a coverage strategy to ensure contracted capacity is secured on combinations of lanes on which demand is expected. However, this strategy leads to unnecessary costs and inefficiencies.
In supply chain design, also called strategic supply chain planning, senior management makes decisions regarding resource investments, business policies, and deployment issues in redesigning their supply chains. Not surprisingly, these decisions have a major impact on operational efficiency and competitiveness. The supply chain design field is rooted in conventions developed...
Beginning in 2020, the e-commerce grocery retail industry grew rapidly, largely due to the COVID- 19 pandemic. In addition to this shift in consumer shopping preferences, retailers are facing another challenge: a looming labor shortage. This shortage of workers has caused enormous disruptions across the supply chain, particularly for activities...
The emphasis on sustainability within supply chains across industries has increased in recent years. Today, companies across the globe report on sustainability efforts and progress each year and set goals to reach ambitious environmental and social sustainability targets. This increased focus has prompted questions regarding how sustainability practices are interpreted...
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), home to almost 27,000 students and staff with almost 400 departments, labs and centers, has a largely decentralized procurement system and informal reverse logistics flow or cost rebate programs for office supplies. Building on the success of the centralized procurement process for personnel protective equipment...
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are 2.6 times more likely to be rejected for a loan than a multinational, and the worldwide trade finance gap for SMEs is estimated at $1.7 Trillion USD. The main barrier to finance for SMEs is the high costs of due diligence during the financing...
Companies can expect to lose almost 42% of one year’s profit every decade because of supply chain disruptions. Working to have better supply chain resilience and robustness is now a necessity to stay competitive and profitable. This capstone addresses the creation of a comprehensive and scalable vulnerability assessment framework for...
Disruption in supply and demand causes imbalances in inventory positions across an enterprise’s supply chain network. In the medical device industry, having the right product at the right location in the right quantity is of critical importance. Therefore, companies thrive to maintain an optimal inventory position across their distribution network...
Within the electric distribution space maintaining a balanced inventory of spare parts forms a critical component of resiliency and restoration in the event of an outage. We find that leveraging network design provides an opportunity for utility companies to improve the effectiveness of the inventory they hold, enabling better service...
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a problem that has been formally studied since the 1930s and attracts great theoretical and practical interest. The theoretical aspects are particularly interesting as the TSP is an NP-hard problem and exact solutions for large TSPs are difficult to obtain. On the practical side...
In today’s business world, supply chain resilience has been brought to the forefront of management topics due to the increasing number of both natural and manmade supply chain disruptions in the past decades. Without an effective method to identify the most impactful resilience actions to take and the amount of...
Global warming is a reality. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Earth’s average temperature may increase by another 1.5°C to 2.0°C in the next thirty years, causing extreme weather, deteriorating air quality, depleting resources, and disrupting economies. By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people worldwide may...
For a broker in the transportation industry, one of the most critical decisions for the carrier representatives within the company is determining which carrier to select for a customer load. In order to determine which carrier would be the best for a shipment, certain criteria need to be selected in...
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ecommerce share of retail has grown at an accelerated rate, increasing the number of home deliveries and delivery speed expectation from customers. Moreover, demand variability over the year and delivering a wide variety of products in terms of weight and volume has...
