MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics

Paradoxically, truck drivers are both scarce and underutilized; optimizing drivers’ time can address both problems.

Today’s supply chain design processes must capture both structural and organizational complexities that have emerged over the past two decades, with a focus on emphasizing value creation based on the ability to serve customers speedily and flexibly.

A resilience-building approach to compare and contrast supply chain disruptions, especially how the Covid-19 pandemic fits into supply chain management’s risk universe.

While companies should understand and mitigate their exposure to supply chain risk, we believe that many become obsessed with risk assessment at the expense of building resilience — the more important objective.

The pandemic took the world by surprise, and it is understandable that our immediate response was far from perfect - however, failing to deal effectively with its aftermath is less excusable.

Inflation is one of the headwinds facing the US economy and consumers, and inflation is fueled, to some extent, by the national shortage of truck drivers; this shortage raises truck transportation prices, which show up in higher prices for every product.

The global shortage of semiconductor chips that is disrupting supply chains in the automotive and consumer electronics industries is forcing chipmakers to decide which customers’ orders to fulfill when product is in short supply.

The full truckload (TL) transportation market’s dynamics in the US and non-binding freight contracts enable shippers and carriers to behave opportunistically when buying and selling TL capacity.

The primary goal of the Last Mile Routing Research Challenge is to encourage participants to develop innovative approaches leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and other non-conventional methods to produce solutions to the route sequencing problem.

Which supply chain challenges will preoccupy companies in 2021? Many are reflected in MIT CTL's research agenda for the new year, so we asked our senior researchers to describe what they would like to achieve in 2021.

Media reports detailing abuses suffered by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China cast a spotlight on society’s long-running failure to eradicate the use of forced labor from supply chains.

During the pandemic, stay-at-home consumers switched to online buying, and the 2020 roll call of bricks-and-mortar bankruptcies reads like a “who’s who” of retailing, however, the pandemic has also unleashed a wave of unparalleled supply chain innovation.

The pandemic is transforming societies on many fronts; this trend, coupled with rising demand for learning platforms that are more accessible and flexible, will permanently change the education landscape.

Listen in as Yossi Sheffi discusses his new book, and what supply chains need to do to compete in a Post-COVID world.

The new standard for proactively assessing a global supply chain’s ability to mitigate the impact of disruptive events will improve agility and help companies outmaneuver uncertainty.