Logistics and Supply Chain Management
This MIT OpenCourseWare course surveys operations research models used to plan multi-echelon logistics systems, covering production, inventory, and distribution strategies across networks with many stages and items. Topics include vehicle routing problems, dynamic lot sizing inventory models, stochastic and deterministic multi-echelon inventory systems, the bullwhip effect, pricing models, and the integration challenges that arise across supply chains. The course assumes prior experience with probability and linear programming, reflecting its advanced, quantitative approach from MIT's Engineering Systems Division and Civil and Environmental Engineering departments. Materials include lecture notes and problem sets typical of MIT OCW offerings, letting students work through the modeling techniques used by logistics planners and researchers. There is no certificate, but the full set of course materials is freely available for self-study.