GOALI/Collaborative Research: Warehouse Integration in Enterprise-Wide Supply Chain Planning under Uncertainty

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The research objective of this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) collaborative research award is to develop a set of innovative models and solutions for analyzing the three-way interaction among warehousing, inventory, and transportation decisions. The warehouse-inventory-transportation problem (WITP) for multi-echelon and multi-period supply chains is proposed and modeled through a stochastic integer quadratically-constrained program (SIQCP). Decisions associated with products with differing life-cycles flowing through the supply chain are also considered in the WITP. To solve industry-sized stochastic WITP instances, a seamless integration of decomposition approaches for stochastic integer linear programming (SILP) and continuous convex relaxation techniques for deterministic integer quadratically-constrained programming (IQCP) will be pursued.If successful, this research will develop novel insights into interactions between the three key supply chain drivers and will prescribe low cost, realistic, plans to supply chain managers. This research will facilitate innovation and excellence in decision analytics at over 600,000 warehouses with annual expenditures of over $100 billion, leading to substantial economic benefit to enterprises both nationally and globally. After successful validation in collaboration with our industry co-PI, opportunities for potential commercialization within the $6.1 billion annual worldwide supply chain software market will be considered. Key findings from this research will be incorporated in an interactive educational website to demonstrate the interplay among warehousing, inventory, and transportation decisions.