Volume              594              2007


Strategic Supply Chain Management in Process Industries
An Application to Specialty Chemicals Production Network Design                  
Authors:   

•     Reinhard Hübner
  

            ISBN: 978-3-540-72180-2 (Print) 978-3-540-72182-6  (Online)

About this bookPractitioners in process industry have to increasingly adapt their global production networks to changes in the competitive environment. A majority of the supply network design models proposed by academia does not sufficiently capture the economic and technical questions that have to be resolved. This book seeks to provide the necessary operations research decision support tools. It builds on an example of the specialty chemicals industry, which faces a strong increase of competitive pressure and has historically grown production networks that typically lack a coherent design strategy.
The book proposes a planning process split into two phases: global production network optimization and individual site selection. To support the former a comprehensive Mixed-Integer Linear Programming model is proposed while an approach based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process is suggested for the latter. Findings from a case study demonstrate the applicability of OR methods to real-world production networks.