Abstract—Supply chains are networks of independent companies in a dynamic environment. The goal of supply chain management is the coordination of these companies in dynamic environment. This research addresses the decentralized coordination of independent operations planning in order to achieve near-optimal solution. Using a heuristic search with local optimization we coordinate two partners of a supply chain. This approach requires only a minimum level of information sharing, by using incentive systems to influence their partner’s planning. Our objective is to develop and to demonstrate that this approach can improve performance, compared to centralized planning and upstream planning.

Index Terms—supply chain management, coordination, operations planning

Cite: Atour Taghipour and Jean-Marc Frayret, "A New Heuristic Search with Local Optimization To Manage A Supply Chain," Lecture Notes on Information Theory, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 78-84, March 2014. doi: 10.12720/lnit.2.1.78-84