CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Reimagining Procurement: Differentiated vs Standardized Services

Publication Date
Our sponsor company is a leading player in the healthcare market. Its procurement organization is split into three divisions: corporate, business unit, and global services. The procurement strategy is set by corporate procurement, and then business unit and global services perform the procurement execution, and measure their procurement through metrics...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Resilience in Upstream Supply Network

Publication Date
After the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations re-evaluated their supply chain strategies and began a race to build resilience in their networks. However, quantifying the level of resilience of any supply chain is a complex task, given the uncertainties associated with disruptions and the dynamics of global markets. This paper proposes a...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Risk Mitigation to Increase Time to Survive

Publication Date
In our increasingly interconnected global economy, businesses confront heightened risks of supply chain disruptions. This capstone project, sponsored by Tempur Sealy International Inc., a leading manufacturer in the mattress industry, focuses on evaluating and enhancing supply chain resilience to mitigate these disruptions. The project introduces a unique methodology that combines...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Solutions for Preventing Trailer Theft

Publication Date
Motor carriers with tight margins and cost constraints are under increasing pressure to improve utilization of their labor and assets. Many carriers face theft of their trailers that are exchanged between shippers, carriers, and contractors. Our project aims to answer the following question: How can trucking companies incorporate anti-theft measures...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Sustainable Network Design of Perishable Foods

Publication Date
Our project analyzes the trade-offs between costs, service level, inventory strategy, and CO₂ emissions in a global food and beverage retailer's current network design. We analyze the network design of a perishable product and evaluate which levers or variables can change (transportation mode, suppliers’ locations, inventory) in their existing network...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Tackling Food Waste: A System Dynamics Approach to Analyzing Food Waste in Wholesale Markets and Developing Targeted Interventions for Sustainable Operations

Publication Date
This study addresses the global issue of food waste in wholesale markets, where 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted annually (in the whole value chain) while millions face food insecurity. Our contribution is a preliminary framework to tackle food waste challenges and promote a more sustainable and efficient food...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

The Green Route: An Analysis of Mode Change as a Strategy for Carbon Emission Reduction

Publication Date
Having recognized the growing need for decarbonizing the maritime transport industry, the sponsor company is assessing the economic feasibility of implementing Green Intermodal Corridors. For a route to be considered a viable option as a Green Corridor, it must have the potential for significant decarbonization while also being economically implementable...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Time Series Forecasting and Dynamic Pricing for Cloud Usage

Publication Date
This capstone explores different classical time series forecasting models to forecast cloud usage for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. The objective is to provide forecast information to help with capacity planning and propose a pricing model to optimize the capacity and manage revenue. The Mean Absolute Percentage Error...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Transforming Micro-Retailing in Emerging Markets

Publication Date
Nanostores, small family-owned businesses, are a critical component of the Mexican economy, providing employment and acting as major customers for consumer-packaged goods companies. Our capstone paper presents a study of innovative business models aiming to help nanostores survive and grow, at a time when the Mexican economy is projected to...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Transforming Warehouses Towards a Sustainable Future

Publication Date
Climate change is a global problem, and CO2 emissions are the primary cause of rising temperatures. Many companies, including our capstone sponsor Maersk, have committed to reaching net zero emissions by setting decarbonization targets. In this project, our goal was to identify specific actions that could be taken at the...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

Unraveling the Relation between Trucking Modes: A Correlation Analysis between Less Than Truckload Metrics and Truckload Market Tension

Publication Date
In 2021, The United States trucking industry generated over $400 billion in revenues. As the economy cycles through waves of contractions and expansions, the transportation industry moves through cycles of slack and tension. This research quantifies the relationship between TL market tension metrics and key LTL metrics on a national...
CTL Globe
Thesis/Capstone

What makes beauty more beautiful? Botanical Supply Chain Network Optimization

Publication Date
The beauty and personal care industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, with consumers becoming increasingly concerned about the ingredients used in their skincare products. There has been a growing preference for natural and organic ingredients, with many consumers looking to avoid products that contain harsh chemicals or synthetic...
CTL Globe
Paper

The impact of transportation capacity in pre-positioning humanitarian supplies

Publication Date
Humanitarian action saves lives by delivering supplies following a disaster. To effectively prepare, large humanitarian organizations solve optimization models to allocate inventory minimizing expected time-to-respond. However, these organizations also rely on transportation carriers to deliver this inventory, a feature often omitted from such models. Part of the reason is that...
cover mobility scale webinar
Report

Lessons from "Technologies shaping the future of mobility” webinar

Publication Date

In October 2022, the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) convened participants from industry, non-profits, and academia, for a webinar hosted by the MIT Global SCALE Network, to discuss the effects of environmental awareness, Covid-19, the rise of digitization, the e-commerce boom, and the rise of energy prices on the innovation of mobility. Digitization evolves with and also fosters four major ongoing techno-economic developments in logistics: automation, connectivity, electrification, and shared ownership.

CTL Globe
Paper

AutoML Approach to Stock Keeping Units Segmentation

Publication Date
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...
CTL Globe
Paper

A review on reinforcement learning algorithms and applications in supply chain management

Publication Date
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...
CTL Globe
Paper

Experiential Learning for Sustainability in Supply Chain Management Education

Publication Date
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...
elsevier
Paper

Can street markets be a sustainable strategy to mitigate food insecurity in emerging countries? Insights from a competitive facility location model

Publication Date
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...
Sage Journals
Paper

Behavior Change over Time When Driving with Adaptive Cruise Control

Publication Date
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...
Sage Journals
Paper

Characterizing the use of Tesla’s Auto Lane Change Feature in Driver-Initiated Maneuvers

Publication Date
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...
Sage Journals
Paper

Modeling Driver-Automation Interaction using A Naturalistic Multimodal Driving Dataset

Publication Date
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...
CTL Globe
Paper

Comparison of Nanostore Supply Chain Strategies in Urban Areas: The Case of Ica, Peru

Publication Date
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...
CTL Globe
Paper

Reflexiones desde la práctica docente: experiencias de aprendizaje para la educación en Ingeniería Industrial en la pospandemia

Publication Date
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...
CTL Globe
Paper

2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge: Data Set

Publication Date
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...
sscs thumbnail
Report

State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2022

Publication Date

View the interactive website.

Download the report in pdf format.

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.