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Preface
As the world moves toward more competitive and open markets in the
twenty-rst century, effective supply chain management is of critical impor-
tance to the success of an enterprise. Despite a large amount of research con-
ducted in the past decades on the supply chain management topic, many
researchers and practitioners are still devoting considerable efforts to the
new emerging problems. This is not only due to theoretical and computa-
tional challenges, but also the business environments and congurations
from various industries, which are continuously changing and becoming
more restrictive and demanding. As a result, numerous new ...