Design of agile supply chains including analysing the trade-off between number of partners and reliability

The reliability of supply partners is particularly vital in agile supply chains as it is vulnerable to the inability of a supply partner to meet its high responsiveness and flexibility requirements resulting in the disruption of the whole network. Disruption can have expensive and extensive results for the entire agile supply chain. To mitigate the risk of disruption and improve the reliability of the whole agile supply chain, decision-makers need to pay more attention to supply chain design and construction, whilst simultaneously taking into account the sourcing strategy decisions. This paper proposes a series of models for the design of agile supply chains using dynamic programming modelling. These provide decision-makers with a systematic way of analysing one of the key decisions of sourcing strategy, namely the trade-off between the number of supply partners and reliability. The efficacy of the models is demonstrated through their application to a Chinese bus and coach manufacturer by way of an empirical illustration. The results show that this approach is effective for this application and it can be applied in other related decision-making scenarios. The methods offered in this paper provide managers with a practical tool to design their agile supply chains while considering the trade-offs between the number of partners and the reliability of the entire agile supply chain

A Comprehensive Review and Analysis of Operating Room and Surgery Scheduling

© 2020, CIMNE, Barcelona, Spain. A comprehensive review and analysis of operating room (OR) theatre scheduling problems as well as a comparison of solution approaches along with suggestions for future studies are presented in this work. A detailed scientometric analysis was performed, which is a powerful tool for conducting bibliometric analyses and comprehensive reviews. OR scheduling problems were categorized into three decision levels, including strategical, tactical, and operational levels. Since optimization of OR problems is an NP-hard optimization problem, we evaluated research studies that employed different mathematical and metaheuristic methods to address OR optimization problems. The comprehensive review presented in this work is divided into two sections. The first section is focused on mathematical modeling, including deterministic and uncertainty modeling, and the second section is focused on solution approaches. The latter section reviews single and multi-objective solution methods. An additional section of this paper is focused on application software that are developed to address the previously mentioned problems. The final section of the paper presents conclusions of this work