Design and Control Principles for Non-Profit Supply Chains

非营利供应链的设计和控制原则

• 批准号: 0654398
• 负责人: Seyed M. R. Iravani
• 金额: $ 28.44万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-06-01 至 2011-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0654398&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Design; Control; Principles; Non; Profit

While America has the strongest national economy with a GDP of 12.4 trillion dollars in 2005, thirty-six million Americans suffered from hunger in that same year. Twenty-five million of these Americans rely on America's Second Harvest (ASH) and their network of pantries, shelters and soup kitchens for food. The largest suppliers to these agencies are regional and local food banks, which serve as distribution centers to collect, store and distribute food. Much of this food comes from surplus food. According to the Department of Agriculture, 100 billion pounds of food are wasted each year in the United States. The goal of ASH and related agencies is to match surplus food with those in need. This matching is a large-scale distribution and inventory management operation, performed daily by thousands of non-profit agencies across the country. Much research has been conducted in academia and the private sector on supply chain problems in commercial settings where the goal is to maximize profit or minimize cost. Little work has been conducted in non-profit applications where the objectives are often more difficult to quantify since issues such as equity and sustainability must be considered. Our work will design efficient control and management principles for non-profit supply chains that are involved in food distribution, based on our on-going work with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a member of the ASH network of food banks.The alternative objectives of non-profit distribution operations lead to new variations of traditional problems in operations research and operation management. We consider dynamic inventory allocation problems and vehicle routing problems with non-traditional objective functions that are aimed at equity and sustainability rather than profit. Our main objective is to develop a series of analytical and simulation models to generate decision rules and insights for effective management of non-profit inventory/distribution networks. We believe that this project will strengthen the relationships between non-profit organizations and academia, and stimulate the interest of the operations research and operation management community toward studying operations of non-profit agencies.

虽然美国拥有最强大的国民经济，2005年的国内生产总值为12.4万亿美元，但同年有3600万美国人遭受饥饿。这些美国人中有2500万人依靠美国的第二次收获（ASH）及其食品储藏室，庇护所和汤厨房网络获得食物。这些机构的最大供应商是区域和地方粮食银行，它们是收集、储存和分发粮食的配送中心。这些食物大部分来自剩余食物。根据农业部的数据，美国每年浪费1000亿磅食物。人道主义事务部和相关机构的目标是将剩余粮食与需要粮食的人相匹配。这种匹配是一种大规模的分配和库存管理操作，每天由全国数千个非营利机构执行。学术界和私营部门对商业环境中的供应链问题进行了大量研究，其目标是最大限度地提高利润或降低成本。在非营利应用方面开展的工作很少，因为必须考虑到公平和可持续性等问题，这些应用的目标往往更难以量化。 我们的工作将设计有效的控制和管理原则的非营利供应链，涉及食品分销，基于我们正在进行的工作与大芝加哥食品仓库，一个成员的ASH网络的食品银行。非营利分销业务的替代目标导致新的变化的传统问题，在运筹学和运营管理。 我们考虑动态库存分配问题和车辆路径问题的非传统的目标函数，旨在公平和可持续性，而不是利润。 我们的主要目标是开发一系列分析和仿真模型，以生成决策规则和见解，用于非营利库存/分销网络的有效管理。我们相信这个项目将加强非营利组织和学术界之间的关系，并激发运营研究和运营管理界对研究非营利机构运营的兴趣。