An application to support the temporal and spatial distributed decision-making process in supply chain collaborative planning

In the context of supply chains operations planning, mathematical programming models have been mainly used for centralised decision-making. However, the supply chain (SC) members not always agree on the alignment of individual decisions to SC-wide objectives and are usually reluctant to share all the required SC-wide information. For these reasons, SC decentralised decision making, in which different decisional units have to be coordinated to achieve a certain level of SC performance, is the most usual situation. In this collaborative planning (CP) context, spatial and temporal integration among the different SC decisional parts has to be considered. This paper aims to develop an application which supports the integrated modelling and execution of the CP decision-making process in SCs made up of several decisional centres (DCs) which make decisions based on mathematical programming models (as in Advanced Planning Systems) under temporal and spatial integration. The described application has been used to assist the CP of a real ceramic SC. The results are also reported.