Supply Chain Management and its Applications in Computer Science

1Preliminaries in Decision-Making

1.1. Introduction

Supply chain (SC) is the framework that gathers different commercial entities perceived to be effective in the planning operations and cost-saving activities. We try in the present chapter to define the main concepts used within the SC and that are related to the decision-making between some entities of the SC, which is generally viewed as a course of actions to be handled and scheduled by the manager. The decision-making process starts by defining and stating the problem. Then, the problem designer should be able to depict the problem features that characterize the above-mentioned statements in order to select the appropriate solution approach. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, two main categories of solution approach exist: optimization approach and game theory approach. Once the solution approach is selected, it has to be evaluated by the use of specifically designed metrics. Simulations are then conducted in order to produce comparative study of the solution approach.

Hence, the decision-making process is decomposed into elementary steps to be handled by appropriate experts and validated to measure the real gap between the theoretical plan and its implementation. This system realization, implementation and validation makes its design (from a theoretical point of view) and building (from a practical standpoint) more coherent and much more efficient once compared to the initial problem specification and system concept that can ...