Fierce competition in today's global market provides a powerful motivation for developing ever more sophisticated logistics systems. This book, written for the logistics manager and researcher, presents a timely and authoritative survey of the modern theory and application of logistics, including case studies in which decision support tools for large-scale logistics applications are developed.

David Simch-Levi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Xin Chen is an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Julien Bramel works in financial analysis in New York City.

Introduction.- Convexity and Supermodularity.- Game Theory.- Worst-Case Analysis.- Average-Case Analysis.- Mathematical Programming Based Bounds.- Economic Lot Size Models with Constant Demands.- Economic Lot Size Models with Varying Demands.- Stochastic Inventory Models.- Integration of Inventory and Pricing.- Supply Chain Competition and Collaboration Models.- Procurement Contracts.- Process Flexibility.- Supply Chain Planning Models.- Facility Location Models.- The Capacitated VRP with Equal Demands.- The Capacitated VRP with Unequal Demands.- The VRP with Time Window Constraints.- Solving the VRP Using a Column Generation Approach.- Network Planning.- A Case Study: School Bus Routing.