Supply Chain Optimisation: Product/Process Design, Facility Location and Flow Control

The idea of this book came to us in October 2002 at the international conference “Production systems design, supply chain management and logistics” (Miedzyzdroje, Poland). This conference was organized by an initiative group from certain French and Polish Universities with the objective to find a new synergy and to develop a Pan European (West – East) cooperation in the areas of: Design of production systems Supply and inventory management Production planning and scheduling Facility location, transportation and logistics Supply chain optimisation via simulation The conference was focused on a wide spectrum of optimisation problems taking into account Supply Chain paradigms, which create a pivotal idea to increase the productivity of modern production systems. The editors proposed to the group members, to present their results for this book. Some well-known scientists agreed also to participate in this work and sent us their contribution. The main idea of this book is that now, it is necessary to consider all the stages of product life cycle in an integrated approach, from the product/process design to the customer delivering. For example at the product design stage, we need to analyse and to optimise all the supply chain. The book is composed of 20 chapters divided into three parts.

This volume is a collection of recent key results in supply chain optimisation. It  presents new approaches and methods based on operations research, artificial intelligence and computer sciences techniques for design of production systems, supply and inventory management, production planning and scheduling, facility location, transportation and logistics, supply flow optimisation via simulation, etc. The content focuses on a wide spectrum of optimisation problems taking into account supply chain paradigms, which create a pivotal idea to increase the productivity of modern production systems.

The first part of the book presents a set of modelling techniques taking into account the enterprise integration problem, the knowledge management in the SME networks, and the human resources in business process engineering. The second part is dedicated to advanced optimisation methods for supply chain design and management which are based on mathematical programming and metaheuristics. The third part of this book deals with some examples of advanced applied decision aid tools directly linked to real industrial problems.

Audience

This volume is suitable for industrial engineers, faculty staff and graduate students in industrial engineering, management science, operations research, artificial intelligence and computer sciences. This book can be used as a reference for graduate courses and also for researchers and industrial engineers to capture current trends in this field.