In today s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on
organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers
grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain
has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that
it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the
supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can
be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require
heavy ...
In today s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on
organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers
grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain
has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that
it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the
supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can
be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require
heavy emphasis on integration of activities, cooperation, coordination and
information sharing throughout the entire supply chain, from suppliers to
customers. To be able to respond to the challenge of integration there is
the need of sophisticated decision support systems based on powerful
mathematical models and solution techniques, together with the advances
in information and communication technologies. The industry and the academia
have become increasingly interested in SCM to be able to respond to the
problems and issues posed by the changes in the logistics and supply chain.
We present a brief discussion on the important issues in SCM. We then argue
that metaheuristics can play an important role in solving complex supply
chain related problems derived by the importance of designing and managing
the entire supply chain as a single entity. We will focus specially on the
Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search and Scatter Search as the ones, but not
limited to, with great potential to be used on solving the SCM related
problems. We will present briefly some successful applications.
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