Strategic and tactical planning in collaborative supply chains: Fuzzy modeling approach

Strategic and tactical planning in collaborative supply chain systems are dealt with in this dissertation. In this concern, two important supply chain planning problems; distribution network design and integrated production-distribution problems are focused on, and fuzzy multi-objective linear programming models are developed to address these problems. Because of the uncertain nature of the parameters and decision makers? aspiration levels for the goals, fuzzy modeling approaches are employed in the models. An interactive fuzzy goal programming based solution approach is also proposed in this dissertation and applied to the models developed. In order to confirm the viability of the proposed solution approach and the models developed, numerical examples are presented. Solutions of the models are performed using several different fuzzy multi-objective modeling approaches along with the proposed approach, and the results are compared. Results of the computational experiments point out that distribution network design and integrated production-distribution problems in supply chains can be handled in a more flexible, robust and realistic way through the proposed solution approach. Interactive nature of the proposed approach provides the learning process about the system. Furthermore, the decision maker controls the search direction during the solution procedure and, as a result, the efficient solution is obtained based on decision maker?s preferences. Results of the computational experiments also confirm our assertion that fuzzy multi-objective modeling approaches can effectively be used in centralized and decentralized supply chain structures, and in strategic and tactical decision levels to the aim of providing more realistic and efficient collaborative supply chain models.