An Interactive Allocation for Depot-Customer-Depot in a Multi Aspect Supply Chain Network

Abstract

Supply chain excellence has a real huge impact on business strategy. Building supply chains (SCs) as flexible system represents one of the most exciting opportunities to create value. This requires integrated decision making amongst autonomous chain partners with effective decision knowledge sharing among them. The key to success lies in knowing which decision has more impact on the supply chains performance. Here, we propose a supply chain which considers multiple depots, multiple vehicles, multiple products, multiple customers, and different time periods. This paper presents a mathematical model for selecting the appropriate depots among candidate depots, the allocation of orders to depots and vehicles, also the allocation of the returning vehicles to depots, to minimize the total costs.