Characterizing the Tradeoffs and Costs Associated with Transportation Congestion in Supply Chains. Final Report to the Center for Multimodal Solutions for Congestion Mitigation (CMS)

摘要

We 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. Our goal is to understand how congestion costs and effects, which are not separable, influence supply chain location and distribution decisions. We 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, we consider an oligopolistic Cournot game and analyze the two-stage Nash Equilibrium. We 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 our solution approaches for finding equilibrium solutions.