Alex Van Breedam

Antwerp Management School · Global Supply Chain Management

Het mobiliteitsvraagstuk is een complex multidimensionaal probleem dat een dringende aanpak vergt, onder meer wegens de verwachte toename zowel van de persoonlijke verplaatsingsbehoeften als van het goederenvervoer. De huidige aanpak wordt veelal gepercipieerd als zijnde gefocust op snelle deeloplossingen. Daarbij worden bijkomende infrastructuurwe...

Due to the rapidly changing environment and the changing customer behaviour, companies will have to rethink the way they deliver their products and services. Most companies are still operating a supply chain that was designed in times of cheap oil, before any trace of e-commerce. These supply chains now run up against their limits and they will def...

Due to the rapidly changing environment and the changing customer behaviour, companies will have to rethink the way they deliver their products and services. Most companies are still operating a supply chain that was designed in times of cheap oil, before any trace of e-commerce. These supply chains now run up against their limits and they will def...

When entering a horizontal logistics alliance, companies can expect a significant cost decrease. In this paper, we show that when the partners in an alliance adopt a flexible attitude (i.e. allow changes to the terms of their deliveries), the total cost can be further decreased. We argue that the method used to allocate the total cost to the differ...

Recently, a trend towards horizontal collaboration in the supply chain has been gaining ground. Collaborative supply chains promise to improve sustainability and reduce transportation costs at the same time. This paper examines the possibility of collaboration and its implementation through a description of the current situation and a case study of...

The behavior of the parameters of 10 heuristics for the vehicle routing problem (VRP) with side-constraints is analysed. Statistical analysis techniques are used to determine the significant effect of the heuristic parameters on the solution value. All analyses are performed on a huge test set containing 420 problems with specific geographical char...

The generalized switched Poisson process results from an alternate switching between two Poisson arrival processes. The phase length times are random variables. This input process has practical applications in the telecommunications area in which it models overflow from a trunk group or traffic in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Numerical algorit...

Three improvement heuristics for the vehicle routing problem are considered: a descent heuristic and two metaheuristics Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search. In order to make an in-depth comparison of the performance of these improvement heuristics, their behavior is analyzed on a heuristic, time-sensitive level as well as on a parametric level. The...

Job-shop scheduling problems are known to be very hard to solve. A traditional solution strategy has always been the use of a single dispatching rule to order the jobs in a sequence that meets a performance objective. However, the use of a single scheduling rule is inflexible in responding to the inherent dynamic nature of a job-shop. Therefore it...

Variance reduction increases the efficiency of discrete event simulation. The method of using control variates searches for variables with known mean which are correlated with the response variable. The more correlated they are, the more the variance of the response variable can be reduced to obtain a confidence interval. Mostly only a few replicat...

This paper reports on the use of simulated annealing-based improvement methods for the Vehicle Routing Problem. The improvement methods considered are aimed at relocating and/or exchanging stops or strings of stops between different routes, starting from an initial feasible solution. The simulated annealing-based improvement methods are compared ag...

The vehicle routing problem is to devise a set of delivery routes from a central depot to a number of demand points, each of which has known requirements, which minimizes the total distance covered by the entire vehicle fleet. As the problem is hard to solve optimally, heuristic methods are used in practice. Starting from a feasible initial solutio...

As a result of the proliferation of the microcomputer, a lot of simulation software for microcomputers has become available. Because the simulation software market is relatively small, manufacturers try to target their packages towards a specific group of users in order to avoid direct competition with other manufacturers. The purpose of this artic...