Globally improvement of upstream planning in manufacturing networks

Supply chains are networks of independent companies which produces the value for final customers. The goal of supply chain management is the coordination of these companies. This research addresses the problem of decentralized coordination in a supply chain with more than two partners. Using a heuristic search with local optimization we coordinate more than two partners of a supply chain. This approach requires only a minimum level of information sharing. Our objective is to develop and to demonstrate that this approach can improve the result of upstream planning.