Supply Chain Consolidation and Cooperation in the Agricultural Industry

This talk evaluates the California cut flower industry's current transportation practices and investigates the feasibility and cost of establishing a shipping consolidation center in Oxnard, California. The problem is formulated using a Mixed-Integer programming model. The model estimates a 34.8% shipping cost decrease, $20M, if all California farms participated in the consolidation center. Our analysis of estimated cut-flower trade flows originating from Miami shows that the magnitudes of these flows are relatively sensitive to shipping cost, controlling for market size. Maged Dessouky Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering USC Viterbi School of Engineering Wentao Zhang Ph. D. Candidate, Industrial Systems and Engineering USC Viterbi School of Engineering Maged M. Dessouky is a Professor in the Daniel. J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California and the Director of the Epstein Institute. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He is area/associate editor the Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, IIE Transactions and Computers and Industrial Engineering, on the editorial board of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, and previously served as area editor/associate of ACM Transactions of Modeling and Computer Simulation and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He is a Fellow of IIE and was awarded the 2007 Transportation Science and Logistics Best Paper Prize.