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Report

Lessons from "Technologies shaping the future of mobility” webinar

Publication Date

In October 2022, the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) convened participants from industry, non-profits, and academia, for a webinar hosted by the MIT Global SCALE Network, to discuss the effects of environmental awareness, Covid-19, the rise of digitization, the e-commerce boom, and the rise of energy prices on the innovation of mobility. Digitization evolves with and also fosters four major ongoing techno-economic developments in logistics: automation, connectivity, electrification, and shared ownership.

CTL Globe
Paper

AutoML Approach to Stock Keeping Units Segmentation

Publication Date
A typical retailer carries 10,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs). However, these numbers may exceed hundreds of millions for giants such as Walmart and Amazon. Besides the volume, SKU data can also be high-dimensional, which means that SKUs can be segmented on the basis of various attributes. Given the data volumes and...
CTL Globe
Paper

A review on reinforcement learning algorithms and applications in supply chain management

Publication Date
Decision-making in supply chains is challenged by high complexity, a combination of continuous and discrete processes, integrated and interdependent operations, dynamics, and adaptability. The rapidly increasing data availability, computing power and intelligent algorithms unveil new potentials in adaptive data-driven decision-making. Reinforcement Learning, a class of machine learning algorithms, is one...
CTL Globe
Paper

Experiential Learning for Sustainability in Supply Chain Management Education

Publication Date
This work is about sustainability-related learning experiences for the discipline of supply chain management (SCM) in Higher Education. It arises from the need to motivate students with relevant and interesting activities to improve their learning performance. Higher Education must respond to dynamic demands to keep impactful topics for students, organizations...
elsevier
Paper

Can street markets be a sustainable strategy to mitigate food insecurity in emerging countries? Insights from a competitive facility location model

Publication Date
This research explores the sustainability of street markets to grant access to fruits and vegetables (F&Vs) to underserved communities in emerging economies. Specifically, this paper studies the impact of adding new street markets to satisfy the demand of end consumers in a real case. To do so, we developed a...
Sage Journals
Paper

Behavior Change over Time When Driving with Adaptive Cruise Control

Publication Date
A field operational test assessed visual-manual disengagement when driving with adaptive cruise control (ACC) relative to manual driving. Ten volunteers drove instrumented vehicles on public roads for 4 weeks, using the vehicles as they would their own. To study change over time, the 4-week trial was divided evenly into two...
Sage Journals
Paper

Characterizing the use of Tesla’s Auto Lane Change Feature in Driver-Initiated Maneuvers

Publication Date
Tesla auto lane change is a feature within Autopilot (AP) – a collection of automated driving features designed to assist the driver with automatic steering and adaptive cruise control. In order to determine how drivers engage in maneuvers performed automatically by AP, 5,154 manual and automated lane change events along...
Sage Journals
Paper

Modeling Driver-Automation Interaction using A Naturalistic Multimodal Driving Dataset

Publication Date
This paper explores a holistic approach to understanding the impacts of on-road factors on continuous driver-automation interaction in naturalistic environments. We processed and synchronized CAN Bus signals, GPS coordinates, and high-definition videos collected from two drivers in 98 trips (~97 hours) involving Tesla Autopilot engagement collected over three years as...
CTL Globe
Paper

Comparison of Nanostore Supply Chain Strategies in Urban Areas: The Case of Ica, Peru

Publication Date
In Peru, the traditional channel dominates with a 70% of market share; however, the modern channel and other organized retail chains (e.g., convenience stores) have been growing in recent years in the retail landscape. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic represented a new challenge for retailers due to the mobilization restrictions that...
CTL Globe
Paper

Reflexiones desde la práctica docente: experiencias de aprendizaje para la educación en Ingeniería Industrial en la pospandemia

Publication Date
Uno de los principales retos que trajo consigo la pandemia de COVID-19 fue dar continuidad a la educación. En ese contexto, este trabajo se enfoca en la práctica de la educación superior en la disciplina de Ingeniería y sus programas académicos afines con una perspectiva a futuro, motivado por las...
CTL Globe
Paper

2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge: Data Set

Publication Date
The 2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge, hosted by Amazon.com’s Last Mile Research team, and scientifically supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, prompted participants to leverage real operational data to find new and better ways to solve a real-world routing problem. In this...
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Report

State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2022

Publication Date

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If there is one characteristic that sums up the state of supply chains today it is the need to navigate extreme change. Our research over the last three years culminating in the 2022 State of Supply Chain Sustainability Report shows the same can be said for supply chain sustainability (SCS). SCS is a moving target.

CTL Globe
Working Paper

The Hidden Costs of Not-So-Friendly Ghost Lanes

Publication Date
Firms’ (shippers’) procurement of truckload (TL) transportation services is a costly, time-intensive process. The result of these months-long procurement events is typically thousands of contracts between the shipper and transportation service providers (carriers) covering each of the shipper’s lanes (origin-destination pairs) over which it distributes products. Due to TL supply and demand uncertainty, shippers often adopt a coverage strategy to ensure contracted capacity is secured on combinations of lanes on which demand is expected. However, this strategy leads to unnecessary costs and inefficiencies.
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Paper

The New Competitive Edge: Analytics-Driven Supply Chain Design

Publication Date
In supply chain design, also called strategic supply chain planning, senior management makes decisions regarding resource investments, business policies, and deployment issues in redesigning their supply chains. Not surprisingly, these decisions have a major impact on operational efficiency and competitiveness. The supply chain design field is rooted in conventions developed...
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Thesis/Capstone

Quantifying Warehouse Automation and Sustainability

Publication Date
Beginning in 2020, the e-commerce grocery retail industry grew rapidly, largely due to the COVID- 19 pandemic. In addition to this shift in consumer shopping preferences, retailers are facing another challenge: a looming labor shortage. This shortage of workers has caused enormous disruptions across the supply chain, particularly for activities...
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Thesis/Capstone

Understanding the State of Supply Chain Sustainability

Publication Date
The emphasis on sustainability within supply chains across industries has increased in recent years. Today, companies across the globe report on sustainability efforts and progress each year and set goals to reach ambitious environmental and social sustainability targets. This increased focus has prompted questions regarding how sustainability practices are interpreted...
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Thesis/Capstone

Closed-Loop Supply Chain Design for Sustainable Procurement of Office Supplies at MIT

Publication Date
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), home to almost 27,000 students and staff with almost 400 departments, labs and centers, has a largely decentralized procurement system and informal reverse logistics flow or cost rebate programs for office supplies. Building on the success of the centralized procurement process for personnel protective equipment...
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Thesis/Capstone

Democratizing Access to Supply Chain Finance for Small & Medium Enterprises

Publication Date
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are 2.6 times more likely to be rejected for a loan than a multinational, and the worldwide trade finance gap for SMEs is estimated at $1.7 Trillion USD. The main barrier to finance for SMEs is the high costs of due diligence during the financing...
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Thesis/Capstone

Global Home Care Supply Network Design Optimization

Publication Date
Companies can expect to lose almost 42% of one year’s profit every decade because of supply chain disruptions. Working to have better supply chain resilience and robustness is now a necessity to stay competitive and profitable. This capstone addresses the creation of a comprehensive and scalable vulnerability assessment framework for...
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Thesis/Capstone

Inventory Rebalancing through Lateral Transshipments

Publication Date
Disruption in supply and demand causes imbalances in inventory positions across an enterprise’s supply chain network. In the medical device industry, having the right product at the right location in the right quantity is of critical importance. Therefore, companies thrive to maintain an optimal inventory position across their distribution network...
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Thesis/Capstone

Network Design in Maintenance Inventories for Electric Utilities

Publication Date
Within the electric distribution space maintaining a balanced inventory of spare parts forms a critical component of resiliency and restoration in the event of an outage. We find that leveraging network design provides an opportunity for utility companies to improve the effectiveness of the inventory they hold, enabling better service...
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Thesis/Capstone

Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem via Semantic Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Networks

Publication Date
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a problem that has been formally studied since the 1930s and attracts great theoretical and practical interest. The theoretical aspects are particularly interesting as the TSP is an NP-hard problem and exact solutions for large TSPs are difficult to obtain. On the practical side...
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Thesis/Capstone

Strategic Approach for Assessing Supply Chain Resilience Investment Options

Publication Date
In today’s business world, supply chain resilience has been brought to the forefront of management topics due to the increasing number of both natural and manmade supply chain disruptions in the past decades. Without an effective method to identify the most impactful resilience actions to take and the amount of...
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Thesis/Capstone

The Impact of Logistics Provider Data Maturity in Defining Scope 3 Transportation Emissions

Publication Date
Global warming is a reality. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Earth’s average temperature may increase by another 1.5°C to 2.0°C in the next thirty years, causing extreme weather, deteriorating air quality, depleting resources, and disrupting economies. By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people worldwide may...
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Thesis/Capstone

Who Are You Gonna Call?: A Smart Recommendation System for Carrier-Shipper Matching

Publication Date
For a broker in the transportation industry, one of the most critical decisions for the carrier representatives within the company is determining which carrier to select for a customer load. In order to determine which carrier would be the best for a shipment, certain criteria need to be selected in...