ITS Berkeley

This paper addresses physical distribution problems, in which items have to be distributed from an origin to many destinations, and it examines ways to reduce inventories. Under certain conditions, a peddling strategy with no transshipments is shown to be superior to any strategy with transshipments. Although the conditions leading to this result are not always met, the results suggest that transshipments are undersirable for freight distribution, unless of course they serve a purpose unrelated to inventory. This is contrast with many-to-many shipping operations which, under the same...

Parallel processing offers several advantages. However, when processing times are allowed to vary, it can result in unpredictable job sequences. This issue must be addressed in assembly systems where it is necessary to match specific jobs with specific materials downstream. This research analyses job sequences after parallel processing and provides strategies for dealing with jobs getting out of sequence. One strategy involves re-sequencing materials using material buffers and another involves re-sequencing jobs using job buffers. A simple analysis determines the size of material buffers....

This paper studies single server queueing systems where customers arrive according to a schedule, but not punctually, and where service might be provided in the scheduled order; thus, customers may leave the system in a sequence different to that of their arrivals. The situation arises in connection with maritime container terminals. The steady state solution to the problem follows an integral equation that may be solved numerically. When congestion is light (as is usual in well managed ports) approximate analytic solutions to the integral equation can be found. As an illustration,...