Prioritizing inbound transportation

Retailers must coordinate inbound shipments from a large number of vendors. In order to manage capacity, retailers need to have a system to prioritize inbound loads with capacitated carriers. This practice creates a constraint when the number of loads exceeds the capacity of committed carriers due to seasonality and consumer shopping behaviors. A prioritization mechanism needed to be developed to support decision making for the selection of loads when capacity is constrained. This research applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process to define prioritization logic for each inbound load and solved a Knapsack model to optimize the assignment. This decision-making model allows the retailer to properly assign load priority based on company objectives. Further, opportunities were found to optimize load priority by up to 8.3 percent as compared to the current assignment. Similar retailers can leverage this research not only to prioritize inbound loads but also to prioritize other decisions such as which initiatives to pursue.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Supply Chain Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Authors dc:creator

• Rassey, Richard Koury
• Zheng, Yong

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Chris Caplice and Francisco Jauffred.

• Supply Chain Management Program.
• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107509

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/107509