Supply Chain Management : Modeling And Algorithms : A Review

. In today’s competitive business environment, supply chain performance is one of the most critical issues in various industries. Over, the past two decades, several frameworks and systems have been developed to meet this need. Prior to the popularization of the term supply chain to describe the network of suppliers, manufacturers, transporters, warehouses, there are models which used the term multi – echelon to represent multiple stages that the materials undergo right from the suppliers up to reaching the customers. This paper discusses the strategic, operational and tactical issues involved in a supply chain management from the perspective of modeling and analysis and presents the models dealing with those issues from the literature. It also discusses the challenges posed by the real – world supply chain problems to the modelers such as huge data, complex interactions among the chain members and uncertainty, etc. This paper also discusses the opportunities created by the latest developments in hardware, information technology and mathematical modeling such as variations in the formulation of the problem and algorithmic methods to deal with the real world problems. From the literature review it is observed that lot of progress took place in the supply chain management in terms of the applications of the models in the last decade. Also large number of papers were found applying meta heuristics to the supply chain network design, optimizing the production, inventory and distribution etc. Also real life supply chain problems with thousands of variables have been solved using decomposition methods. But the literature found that not much work has been done in the field of networking of various supply chain entities such as suppliers, plants, distributors and customers to share the data in online manner. Presently it is found from the literature that the above tasks will be performed off-line. In this regard, cloud computing is found to be appropriate for the supply chain networking, so that data and other algorithms ( for optimization of production, inventory, distribution costs) can be stored in a central web server and can be shared by all the supply chain entities. Also the future work, must focus on developing libraries of supply chain algorithms for various models and their software programs, so that it is not required to begin from scratch for the future researchers.