Management of Inter-Warehouse-Logistics for Stochastic Demand

Contact

• Prof. Dr. Christoph Helmberg
• Dr. Stefan Röhl

Institutions

• Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin , Dept. Optimization
• Technische Universität Chemnitz, Algorithmic and Discrete Mathematics

Responsible

• Prof. Dr. Christoph Helmberg
• Dr. Stefan Röhl

Duration

• 01.04.2001 - 31.03.2004

Cooperation

• eCom Logistik , Falkensee
• Herlitz PBS AG , Berlin

Support

• Federal Ministery for Education and Research

Description

Our industrial partner operates several warehouses within the same city. Some of these warehouses are too small to hold sufficient stock of each product for the next few days; therefore, goods are constantly transferred between warehouses by a shuttle service consisting of several trucks. Part of the demand is known in advance, part is stochastic and has to be estimated from available statistical data.

The task is to find a schedule that distributes the goods between the warehouses by means of the trucks so that demand can be satisfied on time with high probability.

Key Issues

• Solving of coupled multi commodity flow problems by Lagrangian relaxation
• Developing a stochastic model of the demand
• Using scenario trees and/or other stochastic dynamic programming techniques to consider the longer-term stochastic demand

Publications

• C. Helmberg and S. Röhl.
  A Case Study of Joint Online Truck Scheduling and Inventory Management for Multiple Warehouses
  Preprint 2005-3, Technische Universität Chemnitz, Fakultät füt Mathematik, January 2005.

Software and Data

• Code and shell scripts
• Files of the online data streams

Poster (in German)

• Management of Inter-Warehouse-Logistics for Stochastic Demand (Postscript [173 kB], PDF [361 kB])