How can an effective and efficient deployment of supplier development measures improve the material flow from suppliers to automotive plants and consequently reduce the cost of extra tours caused by disruptions? This question was addressed by a team of researchs from Technische Universität Braunschweig and Hamburg University of Technology in collaboration with the Volkswagen Group. The developed approach is based on a Monte Carlo simulation for analyzing the effects of disruptions in the supplier network in combination with a knapsack model for the efficient allocation of improvement measures. In a case study using real-world data from Volkswagen Group Logistics, 18 less-than-truckload networks are analyzed. The results have recently been published in INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.2022.0026