Most of the literature in supply chain management either considers only a part of the supply chain or the total supply chain in some simplified manner. This thesis considers most of the strategic and tactical decisions faced by a real world supply chain consisting of all the four stages found in a typical industry, namely, suppliers, manufacturing plants, warehouses and retailers. The modeling decisions will include the supplier selection process integrated with the production amounts, inventory levels, stock-outs, shipment quantities and transportation routes.
The thesis proposes an integrated mathematical programming model for supply chain management. It is a single objective, multi-period, deterministic, centralized supply chain model. The objective of the model is to minimize the total cost involved in running the supply chain. This results in a mixed integer linear program. The model is tested with a set of realistic data and the optimal results are obtained. Risk analysis, such as supplier price increase, cease of a mode of transportation, is performed over the optimized model and the effects of uncertainty are studied.
