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Logistics and SCM

Manufacturing, Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Faculty associate in this area is Prof Ashutosh Mahajan.

Logistics: Current work in this area is with Ph.D. student Kritika Karwasra

  • A system analysis of the facilities and operating strategy on rail sections with steep gradients (ghat sections in India), where additional banker locomotives are required, brake test is required during descent, slower speeds, and limited overtake possibilities are available.
  • Analysis of rolling stock utilization and fleet planning for special purpose rakes for specific commodities.

Earlier work in logistics applications was mainly with doctoral student Tejas Ghorpade, who worked on several problems to do with deployment of assets on networks (containers, railway rakes, electric vehicles), which involves applications of mathematical programming, network models and simulation.  A workshop was organized together with NEC Labs India in the area of international container logistics.

Supply chain management: Current work in this area is through the doctoral work of Santosh Palaskar, who is working in the area of forecasting for supply chain applications.  This involves probabilistic forecasts (not just point forecasts) and also hierarchical forecasts at different levels of the supply chain. Santosh is being co-supervised by N.Hemachandra and is collaborating with IBM Research, Bengaluru in his work.

A project completed in January 2020 is in the area of inventory management (safety stock levels and demand forecasting) for a very large number of products in the after sales market for an automobile manufacturer.  Master's student Tarun Raj A. worked on this project, which was faciliated by Tilak Raj Singh.

Past work in manufacturing was with Indofil Industries (with Ashutosh Mahajan, Ashwin Murali and Vishwas Shah), and JSW (with Siddharth SenGupta and Ashutosh Mahajan).

A book in the area of Supply Chain Management was published in 2008, co-authored with G.Raghuram and M.M.Srinivasan. 

Manufacturing: Earlier work was in variety management of automobile and other complex products, with doctoral student Tilak Raj Singh.  This was in the area of configuration management, which combined rule specification through intelligent constraint modeling and then optimization using column generation techniques for selecting one or more configurations of interest for various purposes.


Much earlier work in these areas include:

  • Applications of O.R. to manufacturing and distribution systems with Rahul Pandey (IGSA Labs).
  • Inventory management policies in multi-stage systems (including some studies in reverse logistics and perishable inventory systems)
  • Logistics operations and pricing strategies on network wide operations (with applications to container and other modes of freight movement)
  • Diagnostic studies and performance measurement of supply chains
  • Contracts in logistics and supply chain management

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