Dynamic optimisation for highly agile supply chains in e-procurement context

Abstract

In the conditions of an increased worldwide competition, supply chains are struggling to respond to an increasingly volatile and complex environment. With technological advances, current practices to build efficient supply chains have changed. Companies are seeking to use internet in order to cope with the flexible and dynamic nature of logistics networks. The purpose of this article is to address the flexible dynamic e-procurement context under asynchronous and repetitive variations over time. The supply chain considered is composed of two levels (buyer–suppliers) operating in highly agile environment. The questions facing the buyer is how many units of product should be purchased and from which supplier in response to variation in term of price and capacity. Because of this highly changing environment characterised by frequent changes in a short time, most of the classical optimisation approaches seem inadequate to address these problems. Recently, dynamic optimisation has been proposed to deal with such problems. However, we have no knowledge of its application in a supply chain context. We suggest a dynamic genetic approach which is applied to an e-procurement context in aim to optimise the procurement process during time.

Keywords:

• supply chain management
• supply chain dynamics
• supplier selection
• procurement
• genetic algorithms
• optimisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Community related to the region of Auvergne in France, through the project LABEX IMOBS3.