A game theoretic approach is used to analyze an inventory problem with two products, random demand, and random supply. The supply chain analyzed includes two retailers that sell two substitutable products and two suppliers. Each retailer faces a stochastic demand for the product she sells and replenishes her inventory from her supplier. The supplier provides a random fraction of the quantity requested. A given percentage of customers with unmet demand will substitute the product sold by the other retailer. We assume that the two retailers who make ordering decisions are rational players. Since each retailer's decision affects the single period expected profit of the other retailer, game theory is used to find the order quantities when the retailers use a Nash strategy.

Supply chain management has evolved over the course of history in order to provide faster and efficient service to those companies that follow its principles. As there have been advances in technology and changes in the way business is conducted across the globe, supply chains also have had to change in order to remain effective. With greater attention paid to resource depletion, environmental impact, and waste reduction; the concept of closed-loop supply chains has garnered the attention of managers who look to make their production processes more efficient. Finding ways to judge the performance of these supply chains is critical to managers. By identifying key performance measures, they are able to gauge how their closed-loop process is performing as well as identify areas for improvement.

This research considers a single-item two-echelon supply chain facing a sequence of stochastic bulky customer demand with random order inter-arrival time and random demand size. The demand process is a general renewal process and the cost functions for both parties involve the renewal function and its integral. The complexity of the general renewal function causes the computational intractability in deciding the optimal order quantities, so approximations for the renewal function and its integral are introduced to address the computational complexity. Asymptotic expansions are commonly used in the literature to approximate the renewal function and its integral when the optimal decisions are relatively large compared to the mean of the inter-renewal time. However, the optimal policies do not necessarily fall in the asymptotic region. So the use of asymptotic expansions to approximate the renewal function and its integral in the cost functions may cause significant errors in decision making. To overcome the inaccuracy of the asymptotic approximation, this research proposes a modified approximation. The proposed approximation provides closed form functions for the renewal function and its integral which could be applied to various optimization problems such as inventory planning, supply chain management, reliability and maintenance. The proposed approximations are tested with commonly used distributions and applied to an application in the literature, yielding good performance. By applying the proposed approximation method to the supply chain cost functions, this research obtains the optimal policies for the decentralized and the centralized cases. The numerical results provide insights into the cost savings realized by the centralization of the supply chain compared to the decentralized case. Furthermore, this research investigates coordination schemes for the decentralized case to improve the utilities of parties. A cost sharing mechanism in which the vendor offers the retailer a contract as a compensation of implementing vendordesired inventory policy is investigated. The sharing could be realized by bearing part of the retailer’s inventory holding cost or fixed cost. The contract is designed to minimize the vendors cost while satisfying the individual rationality of the retailer. Other forms of coordination mechanisms, such as the side payment and delayed payment, are also discussed.

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The North American forest products industry is primarily commodity-based and faces challenges. This has led to the proposal of a shift toward revenue diversification through the production of high-value specialty products along with the conventional commodity products. A key consideration for this new business strategy to remain competitive and sustainable is that the forest products supply chain designs must perform satisfactorily under the dynamic market conditions. The notion of supply chain operability attempts to characterize the ability of a supply chain to perform satisfactorily in the face of uncertainty. However, limited quantitative analysis is available in the current body of literature. In this work, the concepts originated within the context of process systems engineering are adapted to develop optimization-based frameworks in order to characterize supply chain operability measures, in particular, supply chain flexibility and dynamic responsiveness. Although motivated by the forest products industry, the practical mathematical formulations presented are widely applicable to general process supply chains in other industries. This thesis aims to extend the supply chain flexibility analysis formulation established by Mastragostino (2012) to include additional quantitative flexibility measures. The resulting framework provides a quantitative mapping to various types of flexibility frequently discussed in the operations research literature. Two case studies are included to illustrate the application of this framework for analyzing the flexibility of existing supply chain processes, as well as utilizing it in supply chain design. The work also builds on the analysis framework established by Mastragostino and Swartz (2014) to assess supply chain responsiveness, and to configure the framework in preparation for tackling design problems under uncertainty. Then a composite operability analysis framework is proposed to address both flexibility and responsiveness metrics simultaneously in forest products supply chain design and operation. A comprehensive case study based on a forest product company is performed and the trade-offs among flexibility, responsiveness and economics are examined. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Plantilla para elaborar Trabajo de investigación de Maestría en Supply Chain Management para optar el grado académico de Maestro en Supply Chain Management en el Programa de Maestría en Supply Chain Management. Escuela de Postgrado. Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Engineering, 2019 / Water is the basic necessity for all living organisms. About, five million people specifically children are dying each year due to dehydration or use of toxin infected water around the world. In South Africa approximately seventeen percent of the population do not have access to safe drinking water. Considering all of these challenges it is evident that monitoring the quality of water is important for providing safe and clean water. Several researchers have shown that the parameters related to the quality of drinking water can be monitored effectively in the field. To accurately determine the quality of water it needs to be tested for many parameters. Measuring all possible parameters can be a daunting task. It is very costly and time consuming at the same time. There is also research available in which researchers have proposed remote monitoring of water quality based on fewer parameters in a given water sample to conclude whether or not the given sample was safe for drinking. This has met with limited success. There is however very limited or no scientific evidence available to validate the effectiveness of the selected fewer parameters to determine the quality of drinking water. The research presented in this dissertation proposes a list of fewer parameters that are monitored to determine the quality of water. The effectiveness of those parameters in determining the quality of drinking water has been verified by conducting a detailed analysis on a number of water samples in a laboratory environment. The research has also proposed a system that is capable of monitoring those parameters remotely. This enables the water supplying authorities to determine the basic quality of water without testing it in the laboratory environment resulting in a decreased time and lower cost. / TL (2020)