Network Design of Integrated e-Supply Chain for Agile Manufacturing

Supply chains are distributed manufacturing systems composed of various resources belonging to different companies. The configuration of the supply chain network, integrated with Internet and web-based electronic market places, is essential for business to pursue a competitive advantage. This paper develops a model describing the integrated e-supply chain network and formulates a multi-criteria integer linear optimization problem to select the candidates and the links connecting the stages of the e-supply chain. Hence, some multi-criteria objective functions are defined and suited constraints are introduced on the basis of the digraph modelling the supply chain network. The proposed methodology is illustrated by way of a case study describing a network for desktop computer production.