A heuristic approach for supply chain design problem

In this paper, we present a heuristic approach for the supply chain design problem in the case of multi-site enterprises. The proposed approach decomposes the problem into subproblems and solves these ones with various techniques like neighbourhood search and simplex algorithm. At each iteration, our algorithm sets the state of production and distribution centres for each time period, distributes the necessary capacity amongst the opened facilities and determine the material flows in and between the entities belonging to the supply chain. We apply the heuristic approach to several supply chain design problem. The obtained numerical results show that the algorithm finds a "good" feasible solution in a reasonable amount of computation time.