GLOBAL LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT

Due to service innovation and pressures to improve agility and greenness, daily logistics optimization is becoming important in Japan, especially for small businesses like convenience stores and supermarkets. A recent review of articles published on supply chain management within the last decade has revealed a scarcity of models that capture dynamic aspects relevant to real-world applications and has underscored the need for extensive studies on this topic. In view of these observations, in this chapter, we investigate three-echelon logistic network optimization and provide a practical hybrid metaheuristic method.The model supports decision making at the tactical level for daily planning and inventory management in the presence of demand deviation. To deal with this problem, we extend our strategic approach to include some decisions at the operational level. In particular, we consider the multivehicle routing problem while taking into account inventory management issues. By taking into account the dynamics of demand and warehouse inventory, we try to give a practical approach that can provide innovative resolutions to daily planning problems. Then, to examine some effects of demand deviation on inventory condition, we carried out a parametric study regarding ordering points. The final aim of this study is to develop an integrated information and decision support system that can dynamically manage appropriate databases of resources and product demand. Additional work must be undertaken to realize this goal, such as the deployment of variants of the basic idea and the use of parallel computation to increase the speed of finding solutions and to enhance information retrieval and the visualization of results on a real map...