Resilient Logistics & Distribution System: A Conceptual framework for ABC

Resilient Logistics & Distribution System: A Conceptual framework for ABC

Ritu Raj, Ritu (TU Delft Technology, Policy and Management)

Maknoon, Yousef (mentor)
Tavasszy, Lóri (graduation committee)
Verburg, Robert (graduation committee)
Radford, Alex B. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

2019-08-23

Today, Oil and gas industry is fulfilling the world’s energy need, but while doing so, it is also facing challenges due to volatile crude oil price and global warming concerns. This puts emphasis on cost optimization to increase the profit margin and avoid any cost leakages. The logistics and distribution domain always remained important for managers interested to reduce cost and add value to its product and services. Many a times, due to imbalance between the production capacity and inventory storage capacity, the logistics supervisors are compelled to rent 3rd party offsite warehouse which puts extra financial burden on the company. Hence, there is a need to align the production, inventory and distribution operations to maximize the profitability of the manufacturing facility. In this work, a conceptual framework has been prepared to bring resilience in the transport planning of ABC Refinery and PP Polymer Plant. The main research question in this research is as follows: “How to design a conceptual model for logistics and distribution system to make it more resilient against real time disturbances?”. To answer this, System design methodology has been adopted. In this approach, functional analysis has been performed to developed alternative solutions to bring resilience in the transport planning which would align the production capacity and inventory, thereby offsetting the impact of any external disturbance. In this work, unstructured interviews, desk research followed by survey among truck drivers has been conducted to identify the factors affecting the ABC transportation. Later, Bayesian network has been used to analyze the present operations and to predict the performance in worst case of road congestion. To answer the main research question, literature review has been performed to design a Decision support system for dynamic slot allocation of Truck loading in ABC. The result of this work shows that the Multi Agents based Decision support system can improvise the Logistics and Distribution system of ABC by bringing more resilience in the Transport planning against any unforeseen events. Descriptive evaluation has been performed to assess the performance of this solution strategy over attributes identified in the system analysis. In the end, this work provides recommendation of using Operations research in the slot definition and slot allocation process for new shipment order.

logistics
Transportation
Decision Support System
Business Process Model
Bayesian Network

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a3e8e436-1c8d-45c9-9d15-50e5623950cc

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Ritu Ritu Raj