Reference: DPI2011-23597
Period underway: 01/01/2012 – 31/07/2015
Type: Competitive research projects
Amount: 88,330 €
Financed by: Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
Principal Investigator: Mª del Mar Eva Alemany Diaz
Participants: Fuertes Miquel, Vicente Samuel; Alarcón Valero, Faustino; Lario Esteban, Francisco Cruz; Cuenca, L.; Pérez Perales, David; Alemany Díaz, María Del Mar; Ortiz Bas, Ángel; Boza Garcia, Andres; Gómez Gómez, Francisco Javier

Description:

The main purpose of this project is to contribute to improve the competitiveness of supply chains (SCs) characterised by lack of homogeneity in products (LHP). LHP appears in those production processes that incorporate raw materials directly from nature and/or production processes with operations that cause heterogeneity in the characteristics of the outputs obtained, even when the inputs used are homogeneous. LHP is present in industries such as ceramics, textiles, wood, the marble industry, skin tanning and leather goods. The SCs of these sectors are forced, on the one hand, to classify the final product into different homogeneous subsets and, on the other hand, to deal with a new kind of uncertainty: uncertainty in the quantities of homogeneous subsets available in one same product in planned production batches. This uncertainty is a problem when customer orders must be promised and served from homogeneous units when mixing heterogeneous quantities of the same final product may not be an option. The traditional solution to LHP has been dealt with from a purely technological perspective, and is one of the main contributions of the present project to provide solutions to this problem from a management perspective of SCs.

To achieve this, research will focus on two of the key processes of SCs that LHP affects: the master scheduling of operations and management of orders (promising orders and planning shortages).

Accordingly, the final project goal is of a multiple kind:

1. Develop conceptual models for each process and an integrated conceptual model of both processes to anticipate and respond with sufficient flexibility to this new uncertainty source in a dynamic environment.
2. Develop methods and specific models to help with decision making for all the processes described in a deterministic and uncertain context. The deterministic context will be addressed mainly through mathematical programming models, and will explore the most appropriate models that take advantage of the potential of deterministic models to address the uncertainty introduced by LHP.
3. Develop solution tools for models in deterministic and uncertain contexts, and compare both approaches to static and dynamic cases through simulation.
4. Integrate the above methods, models and tools into a decision-making help system prototype for real practical problems in planning the operations and managing the orders of SCs.
5. Validate the results of this project through an EPO (Ente Promotor Observer) from a supply chain in the ceramic sector.