Mathematical Modeling of Floating Stock Policy in FMCG Supply Chains


Speaker


Abstract

 
Dear all,
 
The next EI/ERIM Operations Research Lunch Seminar will take place on December 21st. The speaker will be Morteza Pourakbar from the Econometric Institute of Erasmus University Rotterdam. You are cordially invited to attend his presentation. Details of the presentation are given below.
 
Remember that this is a lunch meeting. For ordering the right amount of sandwiches, coffee, tea and milk, please let us know before Wednesday December 19th whether you will be present. We hope to welcome all of you.
 
Abstract
In this study two mathematical approaches for analysing the concept of Floating Stock while backlogging is allowed are presented. The floating stock distribution concept exploits inter-modal transport to deploy inventories in a supply chain in advance of retailer demand. It is appropriate in case of batch production and containerized transport of standard product mixes. In this way response times are reduced and storage costs can be reduced as well by having products in the transport-pipeline. Supplying part of the demand directly by road compensates the longer transit time of the inter-modal transport. This concept has been previously introduced and analysed using a simulation approach and showed to be efficient under simplifying assumptions for demand distribution.In this presentation we present two mathematical models to analyse this policy.  The first one tries to optimize the advanced shipping time of containers to inter-modal terminal, and second one optimizes the total number of containers in pipeline and terminal. In fact, in both policies before the demand being realized containers are shipped to terminal in order to benefit from less storage cost at factory by utilizing the shipping time and also free storage cost period at inter-modal terminals. A comparison is made regarding the proposed model results with the simulation outcomes of applying previously developed strategies which shows that this concept has advantages in inventories over other strategies. 
 
Contact information:
Daniel PotthoffWilco van den Heuvel
Email

Email