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.

尽管2005年，美国的GDP为12.4万亿美元，而美国的国民经济最为强大，但同年300万美国人遭受了饥饿感。这些美国人中有25万依赖于美国的第二次收获（ASH）及其餐具，庇护所和汤厨房的网络。这些机构最大的供应商是区域和当地食品银行，它们是分销中心，用于收集，存储和分发食品。这些食物的大部分来自多余的食物。根据农业部的数据，美国每年浪费了1000亿磅的食物。 ASH和相关机构的目标是将剩余食品与有需要的食品匹配。这种匹配是一个大规模的分销和库存管理操作，每天由全国成千上万的非营利机构进行。在学术界和私营部门对商业环境中的供应链问题进行了许多研究，目标是最大程度地提高利润或最小化成本。在非营利性应用程序中，几乎没有工作，因为必须考虑股权和可持续性等问题，因此通常更难量化目标。 我们的工作将根据我们与大芝加哥粮食寄托的持续合作，这是食品银行的ASH网络的成员，为非营利性供应链设计有效的控制和管理原则。 我们考虑动态的库存分配问题和车辆路由问题具有非传统目标功能，旨在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模拟模型，以生成决策规则和见解，以有效管理非营利性库存/分销网络。我们认为，该项目将加强非营利组织与学术界之间的关系，并刺激运营研究和运营管理社区的利益，以研究非营利机构的运营。