in today's globalization, an effective integration of production and distribution plans into a unified framework is crucial for attaining competitive advantage. this paper addresses an integrated multi-product and multi-time period production/distribution planning problem for a two-echelon supply chain subject to the real-world variables and constraints. it is assumed that all transportations a...

inventory control is one of the most important issues in supply chain management. in this paper, a three-echelon production, distribution, inventory system composed of one producer, a set of wholesalers and retailers is considered. costumers' demands can be approximated by a normal distribution and the inventory policy is a kind of continuous review (r, q). in this paper, a model based on ...

supplier selection is one of the most important activities of purchasing departments. this importance is increased even more by new strategies in a supply chain, because of the key role suppliers perform in terms of quality, costs and services which affect the outcome in the buyer’s company. supplier selection is a multiple criteria decision making problem in which the objectives are not equall...

Reverse supply chain is a process dealing with the backward flows of used/damaged products or materials. Reverse supply chain includes activities such as collection, inspection, reprocess, disposal and redistribution. A well-organized reverse supply chain can provide important advantages such as economic and environmental ones. In this study, we propose a general framework and formulate a m...

the health industry’s supply chain is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. thus, building an intelligent system to effectively capture the requirements of customers and help manage the supply chain is very important. despite artificial intelligence widespread acceptance as a decision-aid tool, ai has seen limited application in supply chain management. to fully exploit the potential benefi...

during recent years, determining appropriate strategy in the supply chain has become an important strategic issue. however, the nature of these decisions usually is complex and unstructured. to determine the best supply chain strategy, many quantitative and qualitative attributes such as cost, responsiveness and flexibility can be taken into account. in order to approximate the human subjective...

Global energy crisis and limited supply of petroleum fuels have rekindled the worldwide focus towards development of a sustainable technology for alternative fuel production. Utilization of abundant renewable biomass offers an excellent opportunity for the development of an economical biofuel production process at a scale sufficiently large to have an impact on sustainability and security objec...

Variability on the physical characteristics of feedstock has a relevant effect on the reactor’s reliability and operating cost. Most of the models developed to optimize biomass supply chains have failed to quantify the effect of biomass quality and preprocessing operations required to meet biomass specifications on overall cost and performance. The Integrated Biomass Supply Analysis and Logisti...