| Managers and analysts seeking to design and/or optimize logistical networks can often apply management science techniques, among others, to aid in arriving at recommendations for improvement. This research hypothesizes that such techniques, while available commercially in a variety of computer software packages, are not as widely applied as they might be, especially in the process industries; and difficult to apply without expert assistance in identifying the model technology and software most appropriate for a given application, collecting and aggregating the necessary data, interpreting the results, and converting them into implementable strategies.; This research attempts to identify how existing Logistics Decision Support systems (LDSS) incorporating management science models satisfy such requirements; how managers and analysts at U.S. domestic manufacturing firms are using such LDSS packages; what difficulties users of such packages are experiencing in designing/optimizing their logistical networks. Further, this analysis of the problem leads one to believe that Expert Systems (ES) technology could be a valuable aid in expanding applications, as well as in overcoming most of the hypothesized difficulties. |
