Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Engineering

Department

Industrial and Engineering Management

Degree

MSE in Industrial Engineering

Date Completed

2020

First Committee Member

Niknam, Seyed

Second Committee Member

Salmon, Christian

Third Committee Member

Khosrowjerdi, Mohammad

Additional Committee Member(s)

Cheraghi, Hossein

Abstract

"The objective of this thesis is to develop a mathematical model to minimize shipping costs within an international ocean supply chain while meeting Minimum Quantity Commitment (MQC) contracts and other constraints. This will be done by providing initial commitment allocations for the start of a contract year. Allocations are split amongst carrier in a shipping lane, and each carrier may be allocated 0 or n percent of the cargo to be carried along that shipping lane throughout the year. The model will be developed to accept certain factors and qualitative inputs that will influence the result and should aim to minimize the amount of cargo over a given MQC. This model is expected to be used annually during the MQC process to minimize the shipping costs of a North American ocean supply chain. Linear programming was utilized as the method of solving this problem, with approximately 3500 constraints and 4000 variables used in the final problem. Results show that the model is successfully able to accept heuristics that are decided by an analyst based on prior knowledge of the supply chain. The solution found could reduce the overall shipping costs of the supply chain from previous years. A method to verify the feasibility of the problem was also developed as different heuristics are amended to the problem. Python 3.7 in the Spyder IDE was used to develop the programs and to provide feasible solutions, along with verifying that qualitative inputs will not over-constrain the iii problem to infeasibility. The PulP COIN solver was used to solve the model, along with several python packages including Pandas, tkinter, and openpyxl."

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