System Design And Decision-making Optimization Of Fourth Party Logistics

With the development of the demand for reducing cost in manufacturing,more and more enterprises have focused on their logistics. Fourth PartyLogistics (4PL) is presented under this background. There is no concept of4PL which can be admitted by most scholars. In this dissertation, presentresearch work is fully synthesized. Based on the practical project— "Tianyue"International Building Material Free City, this corporation is regarded as a4PL provider.With the knowledge of the information system, a framework based onmulti-agent is presented and each part of the system is analyzed for basicfunctions. Since the 4PL administrator functions as the core member, adecision support system is presented and the key problem— optimization ofthe logistics scheme, is analyzed.In order to model this problem, two models— "Multi-mension directedgraph using cities as its nodes" and "Simple directed graph using logsitcsservice as its nodes", are presented and an optimization process is designedwith the first model. In this procedure, a method for network simplification isdesigned to reduce the complexity of the logistics graph in order to alleviatethe burden of the computation in the next step. The optimization problem canbe described as— "Searching the first K shortest Path with multi-constraints."A~* algorithm is a method to search the target path in artificial intelligence.With this method, a procedure named A~* Prune is developed to search therequested K shortest paths. Although A~* algorithm can not solve the problemof "exponentially growing", the burden of the calculation can be controlled bythe simplification step and there are not many exchanges in practical business.The last step is to evaluate and select 3PL vendors. AHP and DEA are twopopular methods applied to vendor selection. A method named AHP/DEA isdeveloped to solve the problem of 3PL selection and a simple case isanalyzed.In the end of this dissertation, some technical problems are discussed forrealizing the 4PL optimization procedure and some advice for improving theresearch work are also presented.