(301a) Identification of Supply Chain Relationships and Their Multi-Level Programming-Based Modeling

Considerable attention has been given to managing supply demand networks. The attention is attributed to removing uncompetitive business routines in and out of their networks and in the end, maximizing overall profits. In order to fully take advantage of the benefits, it is very important to understand the basic relationship of supply demand networks. They are mainly addressed as the exchange of material and information. Little research approaches the issue by analyzing their relationships to the author's knowledge.

Supply chain entities can be divided in terms of characteristics. They are heterogeneous in terms of characteristics such as raw material providers, assembly lines, distribution centres, or retailers, etc. On the other hand, they are homogeneous in terms of their functionality with different geographical locations, for example, same manufacturing lines in Eastern Europe, southern Asia and North America etc. Their relationships are identified as a combination of parallel and hierarchical connections. Heterogeneous entities are mainly connected in hierarchical way and homogeneous entities are in parallel. The corresponding models are mathematically formulated into multi-level programming problems. A series of examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed modelling approach and solution methodology based on parametric programming techniques.