9702596 Bramel This CAREER award addresses a number of important research and educational issues in the analysis of production and distribution systems. The research plan considers two open research areas. The first is the analysis of a general distribution problem, which incorporates multi-product capacitated vehicle routing problems, pick-up and delivery problems, vehicle routing problems with delivery and back hauls, and general swapping problems. The second is the analysis of certain scheduling and inventory control problems that arise in production/distribution problems. In both thrusts, the approach consists of probabilistic analyses of performance bounds for both exact and approximate solution algorithms. The educational plan includes enhancing a recently developed course on service operations management, development of an industrial projects course for working business professionals, production of an advanced text in logistics and distribution management, and integration of software developed as part of the research plan into teaching modules. The management of production and distribution systems is one of the most difficult problems faced by managers today. Many companies have acquired model-based decision support systems to assist in the complicated task of developing an effective logistic management strategy. This research has the potential to significantly improve the performance of both the models and the algorithms that lie at the core of these decision support systems, and ultimately to decrease the total cost of operating a production/distribution system. The educational plan will build on the investigator's efforts to integrate research and teaching and will strengthen the level of knowledge of quantitative operational methods among the students at the investigator's institution and other business schools around the country.
