Integrated robust planning systems that cover all levels of SC hierarchy have become increasingly important. Strategic, tactical, and operational SC plans should not be generated in isolation to avoid infeasible and conflicting decisions. On the other hand, enterprise planning systems contain over millions of records that are processed in each planning iteration. In such enterprises, the ability to generate robust plans is vital to their success because such plans can save the enterprise resources that may otherwise have to be reserved for likely SC plan changes. A robust SC plan is valid in all circumstances and does not need many corrections in the case of interruption, error, or disturbance. Such a reliable plan is proactive as well as reactive. Proactivity can be achieved by forecasting the future events and taking them into account in planning. Reactivity is a matter of agility, the capability of keeping track of system behaviour and capturing alarming signals from its environment, and the ability to respond quickly to the occurrence of an unforeseen event. Modeling such a system behaviour and providing solutions after such an event is extremely important for a SC. This study focuses on integrated supply chain planning with stochastic dynamic considerations. An integrated tactical-operational model is developed and then segregated into two sub-models which are solved iteratively. A SC is a stochastic dynamic system whose state changes over time often in an unpredictable manner. As a result, the customer demand is treated as an uncertain parameter and is handled by exploiting scenario-based stochastic programming. The increase in the number of scenarios makes it difficult to obtain quick and good solutions. As such, a Branch and Fix algorithm is developed to segregate the stochastic model into isolated islands so as to make the computationally intractable problem solvable. However not all the practitioners, planners, and managers are risk neutral. Some of them may be concerned about the risky extreme scenarios. In view of this, the robust optimization approach is also adopted in this thesis. Both the solution robustness and model robustness are taken into account in the tactical model. Futhermore, the dynamic behaviour of a SC system is handled with the concept of Model Predictive Control (MPC).

Current North American water pricing practices are inefficient because they are based on average utility expenditures rather than marginal costs and because they typically neglect factors such as the cyclicity of demands, the time of consumption and the value of the water resource. Despite strong criticisms of these practices (Hirshleifer, DeHaven and Milliman, 1960; Pearse, 1985) and the presence of well articulated theoretical models of efficient pricing alternatives (eg., peak-load pricing) no empirical study has been done to document the magnitude of the efficiency gains from altering water prices. A simulation program computes the impact upon a representative water utility's output and deficit and upon aggregate consumer surplus of a move from current practice to efficient prices. The program is based on the estimated costs of supply and demand for water for the city of Vancouver, Canada. A time series of quarterly observations for the period 1975-1986 is used to estimate short and long run marginal costs. The estimated cost structure of the utility is also used to test for optimal employment of its fixed factors: water in storage and capital. Cross-sectional data sets are used to estimate market demands for residential and industrial users. The estimation results indicate that long run marginal cost exceeds short run costs by a large margin and that there is some evidence of over-capitalization by the utility. Water demands are seen to be inelastic for indoor and outdoor residential consumption but are elastic for industrial consumption. Simulation results show that a move to seasonally differentiated pricing (with an annual charge calculated to recoup the resulting deficit) raises aggregate surplus by approximately 4%. Conversely, a move from current practice to Ramsey prices leads to a decrease in aggregate consumer surplus of approximately 13%. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

It is my view, that a serious impediment, in the development and growth of economically underdeveloped Latin American countries with high rates of population growth, is the inability of their economic systems to utilize and absorb continuous additions to their labor force productively. As this condition is expected to persist especially in the rural or agricultural sector of the economy, it is my argument that "push" and "pull" factors can and do operate to mobilize 'redundant', surplus or unemployed labor from sectors or regions where employment opportunities are lacking to sectors where employment opportunities are believed to be in abundance. An important premise then, is that we cannot be optimistic about the possiblity of raising aggregate production over short, or even long run periods in a sector such as agriculture which is hampered by high rates of unemployment and low labor output ratios. In turn, it is my position that if we are "committed" to the economic objective of accelerating the development of the economy's stagnant regions, labor mobility and the reallocation of labor (i.e., reducing conditions of surplus or marginally employed labor in labor surplus areas), to labor intensive "industry" is a necessary prerequisite to the raising of productivity and the encouragement of savings and investment. Accordingly, as we cannot expect that quantities of labor from one sector can be reallocated immediately to another i.e., a question of the "quality" of labor demanded and supplied, an accompanying strategy for the qualitative development of the "human factor" is proposed. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

A theoretical model is developed explaining participation in the labour force in terms of the utility obtained from working, the likelihood of obtaining a job, and the costs associated with getting a job. Both discouraged and added worker behaviour are explained in terms of the model and the much greater likelihood of finding evidence of the former is noted. Regression analysis is then applied to 1961 census tract data for the major cities of Canada in order to discover the determinants of labour force participation rates and especially the influence of unemployment, on these rates. Separate regressions are run for high, middle, and low income tracts. Regressions are also separated by sex. For males, it is found that unemployment, wage levels, age, education, and marriage are important in determining participation rates. The influence of these variables differs significantly among the income groups. A strong discouraged worker effect is found. For women, similar results are found, but children, housing conditions, ethnic variables and the unemployment and earning rates of males also influence their labour force behaviour. Some slight evidence for added worker behaviour was found among the higher income groups. Similar regressions were then run using 1951 census data. Although there was evidence that the influence of some of the socio-demographic variables had changed over time, discouraged worker behaviour still predominated over added worker behaviour for all groups with the exception of higher income women. The results of this thesis were found to conform with the results obtained in earlier studies in the U.S. and Canada. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

Logistický řetězec farmaceutického průmyslu je čím dál tím více složitější a propojenější a tak je nezbytné pro většinu společností disponovat spolehlivým a bezpečným distribučním systémem. Pod rostoucím tlakem na snižování cen je pro každou společnost nutné řídit svůj dodavatelský řetězec tak, aby byla schopna dodávat na trh kvalitní produkty za příznivé a konkurenceschopné ceny. Jen takto je schopna obstát v tvrdé konkurenci.

Thesis is about various implications that can be seen in business processes. It defines the term, describes history, the most important offshoring destinations and positive, as well as negative influences that offshoring has on firms. Practical part demonstrates decisions which firm has to make when it considers various locations of manufacturing.

In the thesis, the author wanted to research the topic of implementation of cloud-based solutions in the area of Supply Chain Management. The first part is devoted to theoretical background of Cloud Computing -- different types of solutions are suitable for various kinds of business activity, and Supply Chain Management. In the second part, the author focused on an analysis of a company - FN Granum and searched for a Cloud Computing solution, which would be the best for it, taking into account current situation and future plans of the entity. Such extensive research resulted in a set of conclusions and recommendations, which may be helpful for any manager considering an implementation of cloud-based solutions into their supply chains.

In this thesis, we study the statistical issues in lost sales inventory systems, focusing on the complexity arising from the stochastic demand. We model the demand by the Zero Inflated Poisson (ZIP) distribution. The maximum likelihood estimator of the ZIP parameters taking censoring into account are derived separately for the newsvendor and the (s, S) inventory systems. We also investigate the effect of the estimation errors on the optimal policies and their costs. We observe from a simulation study that the MLE taking censoring into account performed the best in terms of cost as well as policy among various estimates. We then proceed to develop a Bayesian dynamic updating scheme of the ZIP parameters. It is applied to the newsvendor system. We perform a simulation study to investigate the advantage of the Bayesian updating approach over the traditional MLE approach. We conclude that the Bayesian pproach offers a better learning technique when one lacks of good understanding of the demand pattern in the first few periods. Since inventory policy affects the information acquisition and-the demand distribution updating process, how to determine the optimal inventory policy when the demand distribution is yet to be learned is the focus of the latter part of the thesis. We investigate the effect of demand censoring on the optimal policy in newsvendor inventory models with general parametric demand distribution and unknown parameter values. We provide theoretical proof of the conjecture that it is better off to adopt a higher than the myopic optimal policy in the initial periods when demand is learned in a censoring system. We show that the newsvendor problem with observable lost sales reduces to a sequence of single-period problems while the newsvendor problem with unobservable lost sales requires a dynamic analysis. We explore the economic rationality for this observation and illustrate it with numerical examples. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

The three essays in this thesis address various problems in the general area of supply chain management. In general, supply chain management is concerned with management of the flow of goods, information, and funds among supply chain members, such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. As such, its scope includes timing and quantity of material flow, logistics, improving efficiencies in problems with several decision makers, etc. The first essay in this thesis considers the problem of improving coordination in a decentralized system of retailers, while the second one addresses stability and profitability of Internet-based supply exchange alliances. The third essay analyzes a logistics problem, of finding an optimal route for a capacitated vehicle which travels on a graph and which can perform pickups and deliveries. In the first essay, we study a three-stage model of a decentralized distribution system with n retailers who each faces a stochastic demand for an identical product. In the first stage, before the demand is realized, each retailer independently orders her initial inventory. In the second stage, after the realization of the demand, each retailer decides what portion of her residual supply/demand she wants to share with the other retailers. In the third stage, residual inventories are transshipped in order to possibly meet residual demands, and an additional profit is allocated among the retailers. We study the effect of implementing various allocations rules in the third stage on the levels of the residual supply/demand the retailers are willing to share with others in the second stage, and the tradeoff involved in achieving a solution which is also optimal for the corresponding centralized system. The second essay is concerned with the formation of Internet-based supply exchange alliances among three or fewer retailers of possibly substitutable products. We provide some conditions, in terms of product substitutability and quality of suppliers, which would lead to the formation of a three member alliance, or a two member alliance, or no alliance at all. We also study the effect of alliance structure and quality of suppliers on the profit of a retailer. The third essay considers a vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries (VRPD problem) on some special graphs. Some vertices on the graph represent delivery customers, and other vertices represent pickup customers. The objective is to find a minimum length tour for a capacitated vehicle, which starts at a depot and travels on the graph while satisfying all the requests by the customers without violating the vehicle capacity constraint, and returns to a depot. We have developed linear time algorithms for the VRPD problem on a path and on tree graphs, linear and O (|V| log |V|) algorithm for a VRPD problem defined on a path with parametric initial capacity, and quadratic and O (|V|² log |V|) algorithms for a VRPD problem defined over a cycle graph. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

M.Ing. / The refrigerant R22, which is currently used in hot water heat pumps, delivers a maximum hot water temperature of 60 to 65 °C. This temperature is adequate for domestic use, but low if compared to temperatures that can be delivered by fossil fuels and direct electric resistance systems. This limits the potential applications of hot water heat pumps. In this study two analytical design methodologies were developed that can be used to predict the performances of water-to-water heat pumps. The first design methodology is for a pure R22 heat pump and the second for a non-azeotropic refrigerant mixture of R22 and R142b. These design methodologies were used as tools together with three methods of comparison to determine the influence of a non-azeotropic refrigerant mixture (R22 mixed with R142b) on the performance of a hot water heat pump. It was found in certain cases that, depending on the concentrations, not only are increased hot water temperatures possible but also an improved heating capacity, an improvement in the coefficient of performance and a reduction in pressure ratio of the compressor.