We study the logistics problem faced by Regional Branches (RBs) of a central bank in managing the currency supply under security concerns. While making banknote supply decisions to Sub‐Branches (SBs), the management of RB must achieve two goals simultaneously: (i) guarantee that each SB has sufficient inventories of all denominations of banknotes to satisfy the demands from all commercial banks within its service area, and (ii) control the annual spending on this banknote supply operation. Due to security concerns, the following methods are implemented in the process of transporting banknotes: (i) the capacity of a cash truck is limited by the total face value (instead of the physical space) of banknotes, and (ii) empty decoy trucks are deployed along with the trucks filled with banknotes. After deriving a polynomial‐time strategy to guarantee an optimal solution for the special Bin‐Packing Problem faced in this study, we provide an exact formulation for the RB's supply planning problem. We also propose several polynomial‐time algorithms for deriving either optimal or near‐optimal solutions for the problem under different settings. Using the weekly demand data obtained from the central bank, we verify the performance of our algorithms, and analyze the impacts of changes in these features and in the fleet capacity on the total cost incurred by an RB under various scenarios.

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Està subjecte a una llicència de Reconeixement-NoComercial-SenseObraDerivada 4.

Modern pig production in a vertically integrated company is a highly specialised and industrialised activity, requiring increasingly complex and critical decision-making. The present paper focuses on the decisions made on the pig-grower farms operating on an all-in–all-out management policy at the last stage of pig production. Based on a mixed-integer linear-programming model, an assessment for specific parameters to support marketing decisions on farms without individual weight control is made. The analysis of several key factors affecting the optimal marketing policy, such as transportation cost, when and how many pigs to deliver to the abattoir and weight homogeneity of the batch, served to gain insight into marketing decisions. The results confirmed that not just the feeding program, but also the grading price system, transportation and batch homogeneity have an enormous impact on the optimal marketing policy of fattening farms in a vertically integrated company. In addition, within the range of conditions considered, a time window of 4 weeks was deemed as optimal for delivering animals to the abattoir and the subsequent revenue was 15% higher than with traditional marketing rules.