New publication

EJOR
© Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

The article “Resilient transportation network design with disruption uncertainty and lead times” has been accepted for publication in "European Journal of Operational Research".

In the article authored by Daniel Müllerklein and Pirmin Fontaine, we developed a decision-support model to minimize total costs for supply chains facing uncertainties due to transportation disruptions by determining the optimal combination of resilience strategies such as multi-sourcing, inventory, or operational re-routing.  The problem is modeled as a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear program that explicitly considers lead times. To solve large instances, a Benders decomposition approach is proposed, enhanced with lower-bound lifting, valid inequalities, branch-and-benders-cut, and a warm-start heuristic. In the numerical study, we show that a mix of resilience strategies across strategic, tactical, and operational levels can lead to cost improvements of up to 50%. Additionally, we demonstrate that predictable disruptions can reduce resilience costs by a further 10% if sufficient re-routing capacities are available.

The article is now available online here