Management and optimization of multiple supply chains

Supply Chain Management (SCM) plans and controls the production over a group of autonomous enterprises. Process-oriented design is used to eliminate inefficiencies of the chain on a strategic level. This Virtual Enterprise (VE) must also manage and optimize the collaborative production on a tactical and operative level. Production planning, scheduling, and control are thus important functions for the efficiency and flexibility in the VE. The difficulty and main difference between a single enterprise and a virtual enterprise is that individual entities are autonomous and will be guided by local objectives, too. In this paper, we investigate the relation between scheduling and SCM from two points of view. We investigate first which results from scheduling research are applicable for assigning work to individual entities of the supply chain. Second, we determine requirements for an entity’s scheduling system to support SCM and sketch our approach based on cooperative and reactive scheduling.