Supply chain management issues faced by a manufacturing company are considered in this paper. The supply chain consists of a manufacturing company and its suppliers. The manufacturer produces multiple products with inputs (e.g., raw materials) from the suppliers, but each product needs a different mix of these inputs. The market demand for the products is uncertain. We develop a mathematical model and algorithm, which can help the manufacturer to solve its procurement decision problem: how much of raw material to order from which supplier. The model incorporates such factors as market demand uncertainty, product's input requirement, supplier's as well as manufacturer's capacity, plus other costs comparable with those in a typical newsboy problem. Numerical examples are presented to see the interacting effects among critical parameters and variables.

We consider the design of a two-level telecommunication network having logical full-mesh/star topology, with the implementation of conduit systems taken together. The design problem is then viewed as consisting of three subproblems: locating hub facilities, placing a conduit network, and installing cables therein to configure the logical full-mesh/star network. Without partitioning into subproblems as done in the conventional approach, the whole problem is directly dealt with in a single integrated framework, inspired by some recent successes with the approach. We successfully formulate the problem as a variant of the classical multicommodity flow model for the fixed charge network design problem, aided by network augmentation, judicious commodity definition, and some flow restrictions. With our optimal model, we solve some randomly generated sample problems by using CPLEX MIP program. From the computational experiments, it seems that our model can be applied to the practical problem effectively.

It is discussed how to assign delivery tasks to automated guided vehicles (AGVs) for multiple container cranes in automated container terminals. The primary goal of dispatching AGVs is to complete all the lading and discharging operations as early as possible, and the secondary goal is to minimize the total travel distance of AGVs. It is assumed that AGVs are not dedicated to a specific container crane but shared among multiple cranes. A mathematical formulation is developed and a heuristic algorithm is suggested to obtain a near optimal solution with a reasonable amount of computational time. The single-cycle and the dual-cycle operations in both the seaside and the landside operations are analyzed. The effects of pooling AGVs for multiple container cranes on the performance of an entire AGV system are also analyze through a numerical experiment.