Baldassarre, Silvia (2023) Models and methods to redesign service networks in times of transition. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

Digital transformation has been radically changing how businesses operate and deliver value to customers. One of its most notable impacts is the radical transformation in how businesses and their final customers mutually communicate and transact through the delivery channels. Traditional firms, who relied on face-to-face interaction with their customers through (solely) physical delivery channels in the past, have been expanding the spectrum of their delivery channels, integrating the digital ones, to respond to and anticipate the changing customers' expectations. In turn, in many cases, it is necessary for such businesses to reorganize their network of physical facilities to achieve cost-efficient goals and be still effective. In this thesis, we focus on developing new tailored mathematical models to implement location-based actions toward a sustainable spatial reorganization of facility networks in the retail sector. The models should be able to provide decision support and valuable insights for decision-makers in the aftermath of digitalization and customers' changing behaviour. Location analysis is the literature field we refer, specifically covering and cooperative models, to model our problems. The thesis aims to contribute to this research field by introducing and investigating two problems. The first one consists of the branch restructuring network problem in the banking sector, formulated as a covering model. Multiple and hierarchical facilities providing different interrelated services are considered. Although the branch network problem has been extensively analysed in the literature, the novelty of our problem is mainly given by the combination of the considered strategies that make the branch network more complex due to the multifaceted and interrelated characteristics of banking services. We consider a real case study concerning one of the leading banking groups in Italy in a metropolitan city. Extensive experiments prove the models' capability to obtain insightful managerial implications. The second problem is a generalization of the first one, by allowing cooperation among facilities using a probabilistic approach. The problem is new since there are no previous studies considering multiple facilities that (i) are arranged in a nested hierarchy and (ii) cooperate to cover the demand while (iii) assuming possibly correlated coverage events. A non-linear formulation of the problem as well as an equivalent linear one are developed. A classification framework is proposed in order to assess the value of the cooperation among facilities. The problem is tested on real (the branch network) and randomly generated instances by varying critical parameters to analyze cooperative mechanisms among facilities. Some general conclusions and directions for further research are drawn.

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