Characterizing the Tradeoffs and Costs Associated with Transportation Congestion in Supply Chains

The authors consider distribution and location-planning models for supply chains that explicitly account for traffic congestion effects. The majority of facility location and transportation planning models in the operations research literature consider facility operations and transportation costs as separable (e.g., linear) by origin-destination pairs. Their goal is to understand how congestion costs and effects, which are not separable, influence supply chain location and distribution decisions. The authors study a competitive facility location and market-supply game with multiple firms competing in multiple markets in a congested distribution network. As a result of location and quantity decisions, firms are subject to location-specific transportation costs, convex traffic congestion costs and fixed facility location costs. The unit price in each market is a linear decreasing function of the total amount shipped to the market by all firms; that is, the authors consider an oligopolistic Cournot game and analyze the two-stage Nash Equilibrium. They discuss the results of extensive numerical studies that illustrate the effects of traffic congestion on a firm's equilibrium location and quantity decisions and demonstrate the efficiency of their solution approaches for finding equilibrium solutions.

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  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
  • Corporate Authors:

    University of Florida, Gainesville

    Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
    Gainesville, FL  United States  32611

    Center for Multimodal Solutions for Congestion Mitigation

    University of Florida, 10516 SW 22nd Avenue
    Gainesville, FL  United States  32607-3269

    Research and Innovative Technology Administration

    1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
    Washington, DC  United States  20590
  • Authors:
    • Geunes, Joseph
    • Konur, Dincer
  • Publication Date: 2010-1-21

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Print
  • Edition: Final Report
  • Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 60p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01154169
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: CMS Project No. 2008-004
  • Files: UTC, NTL, TRIS, USDOT
  • Created Date: Apr 5 2010 4:10PM