Advanced OR and AI Methods in Transportation TRENDS IN MODELLING SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOGISTIC.pdf

Advanced OR and AI Methods in Transportation TRENDS IN MODELLING SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOGISTIC NETWORKS Maurizio BIELLI, Mariagrazia MECOLI? Abstract. According to the new tendencies in marketplace, such as the growth and spread of e-commerce and e-business, Supply chains and Logistics are natu- rally being modeled as distributed systems. Companies are organized as Demand and Supply network and the global logistics system is performed by a large-scale world-wide network of local service enterprises. Referring to such scenario, multi- agents and operations research approaches in modelling classical and new complex problems are reviewed and illustrated. Operation Research techniques for central- ized optimization are discussed with reference to classical resource allocation and workflow problems. 1. Introduction Current scenario in production and logistic fields shows globalization, needs for increasing quality of goods, rapid changing in market demand, customer-service policies, flexibility of production processes, e-business and e-commerce. An increasing number of companies is adopting the supply chain organization method- ology in order to improve the competitiveness and profitability. These companies are organized as Demand and Supply network through which raw materials are acquired, trans- formed into products and delivered to customers. The supply chain is a complex network of organizations (enterprises devoted to manu- facturing, purchasing, distribution, marketing, etc.) with different and conflicting objectives, which can be essentially organized in two different ways. It can be controlled by a central partner (company) which is dominant respect to the other components of the supply chain in taking decisions. While, a second type of organization defines the supply chain network as a distributed system composed by several parallel and independent agents, and manage- ment consists of guaranteeing the coherence between the different decision making centers (agents).