Adaptive supply chain management

Abstract

The recent transformation of the world's economic environment necessitates the re-thinking of supply chain management (SCM) goals and decision-making techniques. Adaptive Supply Chain Management develops new viewpoints on the SCM goal paradigm, problem semantics, and decision-making support. Drawing upon years of research and practical experience, and using numerous examples, the authors unite conceptual considerations of supply chains with a constructive level of engineering and solutions to real-world problems. Adaptive Supply Chain Management provides advanced insights into dynamics, complexity, and uncertainty in supply chains from the perspectives of systems analysis, control theory, and operations research. It also considers supply chain adaptability, stability, and crisis-resistance. Particular highlights include: an understanding of supply chain performance as a composition of profitability and global stability; the tackling of links between partial SCM problems with regard to different management levels, different supply chain structures, and in supply chain dynamics; a mathematical approach based on the combined application of control theory, systems analysis, operations research, and agent-oriented modelling; and supply chains modelled as dynamic multi-structural active systems. Providing readers with a comprehensive view of advanced SCM concepts, constructive mathematical techniques and models, Adaptive Supply Chain Management is an invaluable text for practitioners and researchers who specialize in SCM and operations. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010.