Advances in Integrated and Sustainable Supply Chain Planning: Concepts, Methods, Tools and Solution Approaches toward a Platform for Industrial Practice

Decision making at the enterprise level often encompass not only production operations and product R&D, but other strategic functions such as financial planning and marketing. With the aim of maximizing growth and a firm’s value, companies often focus on co-ordinating these functional components as well as traditional hierarchical decision levels. Understanding this interplay can enhance enterprise capabilities of adaptation and response to uncertainties arising from internal processes as well as the external environment.

This book presents concepts, methods, tools and solutions based on mathematical programming, which provides the quantitative support needed for integrated decision-making and ultimately for improving the allocation of overall corporate resources (e.g., materials, cash and personnel).

Through a systems perspective, the integrated planning of the supply chain also promotes activities of reuse, reduction and recycling for achieving more sustainable environmental impacts of production/distribution networks. Thus, this book presents, for the first time, a unique integrated vision of the Enterprise Supply Chain Planning and provides a comprehensive account of the state of the art models, methods and tools available to address the above mentioned features of the modern supply chain.

It offers a comprehensive review of the associated literature of supply chain management and then systematically builds on this knowledge base to develop the mathematical models representing each of the core functional units and decision levels of the corporation and shows how they can be integrated into a holistic decision problem formulation.

Abundant illustrations and tables help maximize reader insights into the problems discussed with several case studies and industry application also examined.

This book is intended as a textbook for academics (PhD, MSc), researchers and industry decision-makers, who are involved in the design,retrofit and evaluation of alternative scenarios for the improvement of the supply chain.

Dr. José Miguel Laínez is currently Research Associate in the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. His research is focused on the application of modeling and optimization techniques to provide support in decision making processes. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya where he started working in research and development of novel methods and techniques in the area of enterprise integrated supply chain design and management with emphasis in robust, sustainable solutions and procedures for decision-making support, a field of relevance for both engineering academics as well as professional practitioners in the process systems engineering and operations research area. He participated in a number of international (“Towards Knowledge-Based Processing Systems-PRISM”, Combinatorial techniques for the scheduling of complex batch chemical systems) and national (Sistema de Soporte Avanzado para Procesos de Fabricacion Flexible en la Industria Quimica y Petroquimica (ToleranT)) projects. As the result of his research activity he has produced 15 peer reviewed articles, 3 book chapters and around 30 presentations in international congresses related to supply chain modeling and optimization.

Dr. Luis Puigjaner has been Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) for 46 years of a basic process design course for engineers and an advanced course in process design and optimization for PhD students. Since 1986 he started an additional research line on Process Systems Engineering (PSE). Since then, several projects have been carried out under his leadership in PSE activities (29 European Commission sponsored projects; 22 national projects financed by the Spanish government; 35 contracts with the private industry). As a result of this activity 35 Ph.D. Thesis have been completed in PSE domain of which 24 were related with the topics of this book have been realized under his supervision, 151 peer reviewedarticles in top indexed journals (71 strictly related to the topic of this book) have been published in indexed journals, 230 book chapters (113 strictly related to the topic of this book) have been written and 281 presentations (143 strictly related to the topic of this book) have been made at International Symposia. Commercial software was developed (MOPP) and exploited by a spin-off company (BOLD). Under Professor Puigjaner auspices, two pilot plants (CIMNE and PROCEL) were built for software testing purposes. Applications have been made to the polymers, textile, sugar, food, bier pharmaceutical industrial sectors, phosphoric acid and robot manufacturing.