Nowadays, the market competition becomes increasingly fierce due to diversified customer needs, stringent environmental requirements, and global competitors. One of the most important factors for companies to not only survive but also thrive in today’s competitive market is their logistics performance. This paper aims, through a systematic literature analysis of 115 papers from 2012 to 2020, at ...

This paper presents a decision-support model aiming, primarily, at maximizing the productivity of surface coal mining activities through operational planning and management. The model is formulated based upon mixed integer programming, and it determines the optimal production plan of the shovels and allocation plan of the haul trucks in order to minimize operational cost, fuel consumption as well ...

With the rapid technological advancement and innovation in Industry 4.0/5.0, digitalization has become the mainstream that transforms the paradigm of many industries, businesses, and services. In this regard, AI-enabled chatbots have been increasingly adopted by many companies for providing customer services instead of human agents. On the one hand, the use of AI-enabled chatbots provides opportunities ...

Since December 2020, the vaccines from several manufacturers, e.g., Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, etc., have been approved for mass vaccination to control the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused more than 100 million infections and 2.4 million deaths. These vaccines are produced and transported in large quantities to suffice the needs of several countries. Before arriving at the end-users, the vaccines ...

Beyond its significance in urban planning and traffic engineering, the optimal design of road networks is crucial for the uninterrupted flow of traffic. Traffic congestion results in increased travel times and waiting times as well as higher CO₂ emissions. It is therefore imperative to study and optimize the traffic flow through roads and junctions to avoid such conditions. In this paper, ...

Nowadays, due to the concern of environmental challenges, global warming and climate change, companies across the globe have increasingly focused on the sustainable operations and management of their supply chains. Closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) is a new concept and practice, which combines both traditional forward supply chain and reverse logistics in order to simultaneously maximize the utilization ...

To maximize the value and material recovery from waste products, smart reverse logistics aims at managing the complex flows of physical items, cash, data, and information. The effective management of these flows requires optimal decision making at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. To support the decision making, predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive analytics have been proved to be ...