Location Problems for Supply Chain

A typical supply chain is a materials and information network composed by supplier, manufactures, logistics agencies, distribution center, warehouse, retailer and consumer. It involves all enterprises and departments throughout the whole product life-cycle from the material gaining, production to semi-finished products or finished products, assembly, transportation, consumption till disposal. Supply chain management is the term used to describe the management of the flow of materials, information, and funds across from those enterprises and departments. It has been proved to be an effective way to enhance enterprises’ adaptive ability and viability in the market by collaborating with the upstream and downstream enterprises in the competitive market. Traditionally, location problem is a branch of operations research concerning itself with mathematical modeling and solution of problems concerning optimal placement of facilities in order to minimize transportation costs, avoid placing hazardous materials near housing, outperform competitors’ facilities, etc. Location problems in supply chain management is to find the ideal locations for suppliers, manufactures, distribution centers and warehouses to achieve different objectives by using mathematical modelling, heuristics, and mathematical tools such as, ILOG CPLEX, LogicNetPlus etc. With the increased environment pollution concerns of people, organizations and governments, enterprises are facing pressure to protect and improve the environment, such as decreasing environment pollution, reducing waste cites and using green raw material etc. In order to solve this problem, enterprises begin to integrate Supply Chain Management (SCM) with the thought of environment protection. With the development of researches on this problem, it naturally comes green supply chain management Stevels (2002). Presently, green supply chain management are mainly focused on the following two aspects: 1) green technology, such as green design, green manufacturing and remanufacturing, waste management, and green logistics and greenmanagementWang et al. (2005). 2) greenmaterials flow, it is to make material flow effective and green by the management of material flow, for example, using green materials, recycling disposal products etc Srivastava (2007). Among those technologies, the approaches for location problems play key roles in green supply chain management. 15