Design and Control Principles for Non-Profit Supply Chains

虽然美国拥有最强劲的国民经济，2005年国内生产总值达到12.4万亿美元，但在同一年，3600万美国人遭受饥饿。这些美国人中有2500万人依靠美国第二丰收组织和他们的食品储藏室、庇护所和施舍网络获取食物。这些机构的最大供应商是地区和当地的食品银行，它们是收集、储存和分发食品的配送中心。这些食物有很大一部分来自多余的食物。根据农业部的数据，美国每年浪费1000亿磅的食物。ASH和相关机构的目标是将多余的食物与需要的人相匹配。这种配对是一种大规模的配送和库存管理操作，每天由全国数千家非营利机构进行。学术界和私营部门对以利润最大化或成本最小化为目标的商业环境下的供应链问题进行了大量研究。非盈利性应用程序的工作很少，因为必须考虑公平和可持续性等问题，这些应用程序的目标往往更难量化。我们的工作将基于我们与ASH食品银行网络成员大芝加哥食品储存库的持续工作，为涉及食品配送的非营利性供应链设计有效的控制和管理原则。非营利性配送业务的替代目标导致运筹学研究和运营管理中传统问题的新变化。我们考虑了以公平和可持续性为目标的非传统目标函数的动态库存分配问题和车辆路径问题，而不是利润目标。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。我们相信，这一项目将加强非营利组织与学术界的联系，并激发运筹学和运营管理界对研究非营利机构运营的兴趣。

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.