Supply chain management in view of climate change: an overview of possible impacts and the road ahead

Purpose: The paper aims to provide a general overview of the impacts of climate change upon supply chains and to analyze the implications of climate change for supply chain management in terms of strategic and operational planning. A roadmap of fruitful research approaches is also presented. Design/methodology/approach: The paper makes use of a general review of the relevant literature and, based on a systematic categorization of the findings, looks for useful insights towards the issues of climate change and supply chain management. A framework is drawn for systematically assessing the impacts of climate change upon supply chains and their management, while making suggestions for future research. Findings and Originality/value: Supply chain networks run physical, operational and reputational risks attributed to climate change. Escalation in regulations, market forces and stakeholders’ pressures are paving the way for the decarbonization of supply chains with obvious implications for supply chain management. Supply chain managers should pay special attention to the impacts of climate change on supply chains and academics should further explore the interrelationships between climate change and supply chain design and operations. Research limitations/implications: Additional qualitative research based on grounded theory is suggested for validating and interconnecting the findings with empirical data. Practical implications: The paper provides several insights towards the issues of supply chain management in view of climate change and may serve as an initial basis for exploring future research directions by academics. Practitioners, especially those drafting value-creating supply chain agendas, may also find these insights useful for improving their managerial practices. Originality/value: By providing an original structured overview of the impacts of climate change upon supply chain design and operations management the paper substantiates the need for management improvements and provides research directions that may prove valuable to researchers

A framework for group decision support systems: Combining AI tools and OR techniques

Work on the implementation of Group Decision Support Systems has to exploit recent advancements of computer science. Existing frameworks for single-user Decision Support Systems, based on well-established Operations Research methods such as Multicriteria Decision Making techniques, have to be integrated with successful technical developments in electronic communication and computing. Starting from the presentation of the related Operations Research background, this paper proceeds by discussing challenges coming from the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Information Systems on the World Wide Web platform. Based on this discussion, a framework for an "open", computer-mediated Group Decision Support System is proposed. The term "open" is related to a platform-independent system, which can efficiently support alternative types of goals and control protocols between its users

Production planning and control in textile industry: A case study

This paper presents an interactive model based system for the management of production in textile production systems focusing on the Master Production Scheduling problem. Because of the special characteristics of the industry, that is mainly the multi-phase process with multiple units per phase, different planning horizons and different production requirements for each phase, the scheduling of these systems becomes quite complex. Apart from a comprehensive presentation of the set of the modules the system is composed of, together with their interrelationships, the above characteristics are analyzed, and their impact on the production control system is explained. The system is also related to two well-known production control systems, namely MRP-II and Optimised Production Technology. The system's attributes are presented with the aid of data structure diagrams, while the complete algorithm concerning the Master Production Scheduling module, in a pseudo-code form, and the corresponding part of the database are illustrated in the Appendix. Keywords: Master Production Scheduling, Decision Support Systems, Production Planning, MRP-II, Textile Industry. 1. Introduction Textile production systems form an interesting area for the study of scheduling problems. The industry has been developed following both vertical integration, particularly among spinning and weaving firms, and horizontal integration, promoted by the idea that a full line of textile products is necessary for effective marketing [1]. Such production systems comprise various page