A Supply Chain Design Problem, Integrated Facility Unavailability Management

A supply chain is a set of facilities connected together in order to provide products to customers. The supply chain is subject to random failures caused by different factors which cause the unavailability of some sites. Given the current economic context, the management of these unavailability is becoming a strategic choice to ensure the desired reliability and availability levels of the different supply chain facilities. In this work, we treat two problems related to the field of supply chain, namely the design and unavailability management of logistics facilities. Specifically, we consider a stochastic distribution network with consideration of suppliers' selection; distribution centers location (DCs) decisions and DCs’ unavailability management. Two resolution approaches are proposed. The first one called non-integrated approach consists of defining the optimal supply chain structure using an optimization approach based on genetic algorithms (GA), then to simulate the supply chain performance in the presence of DCs failures. The second approach called integrated approach is to consider the design of the supply chain problem and unavailability management of DCs in the same model. Note that, we replace each unavailable DC by performing a reallocation using GA in the two approaches. The obtained results of the approaches are detailed and compared to show their effectiveness.