Production and distribution planning in a supply chain network

Production and distribution planning in a supply chain network considering a time varying demand environment requires the coordination of replenishment schedules among the various stages of the network taking into account raw material replenishment, production, inventory, and transportation costs, production and transportation lead-times, as well as quality and capacity constraints. When operating in a rolling horizon environment, some portion of the current schedule may be implemented, a further portion frozen or declared immune from revision, and the remaining portion can be re-scheduled with updated information and new information concerning future periods. This re-scheduling of order quantities and replenishment periods may itself have substantial costs associated with it. The purpose of this study is to isolate the rolling horizon effect in a serial supply chain with time varying demand, by comparing the schedules generated with different combinations of time horizon length (in number of periods) and number of overlapping periods.