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2008
Conference Paper
Titel
Network design decisions in supply chain planning
Alternative
Entscheidungen zum Netzwerkdesign in der Supply Chain Planung
Abstract
Structuring global supply chain networks is a complex decision-making process. The typical inputs to such a process consist of a set of customer zones to serve, a set of products to be manufactured and distributed, demand projections for the different customer zones, and information about future conditions, costs (e.g. for production and transportation) and resources (e.g. capacities, available raw materials). Given the above inputs, companies have to decide where to locate new service facilities (e.g. plants, warehouses), how to allocate procurement and production activities to the various manufacturing facilities, and how to manage the transportation of products through the supply chain network in order to satisfy customer demands. We propose a mathematical modelling framework capturing many practical aspects of network design problems simultaneously. For problems of reasonable size we report on computational experience with standard mathematical programming software. The discussion is extended with other decisions required by many real-life applications in strategic supply chain planning. In particular, the multi-period nature of some decisions is addressed by a more comprehensive model, which is solved by a specially tailored heuristic approach. The numerical results suggest that the solution procedure can identify high quality solutions within reasonable computational time. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the general settings and assumptions of classical facility location models and discusses the reasons why such models are not suitable to support strategic decisions in supply chain planning. Section 3 introduces a comprehensive model that captures important practical aspects of SCND. Section 4 is dedicated to a number of features specific to strategic SCM but which have not received adequate attention in the literature on facility location. One of the discussed aspects concerns an extended planning horizon which is further examined in Section 5 through the development ofa multi-period facility relocation model. A novel heuristic approach based on tabu search is briefly described for solving this problem. Finally, Section 6 presents some conclusions and possible directions for future research.