Exploiting max-sum for the decentralized assembly of high-valued supply chains

Supply Chain Formation involves determining the participants and the exchange of goods within a production network. Today’s companies operate autonomously, making local decisions, and coordinating with other companies to buy and sell goods along their Supply Chains. Such temporal interactions need to be formed rapidly and in a decentralized manner. For sufficiently large problems, current state-of-the-art approaches for Decentralized Supply Chain Formation are only capable of either (i) producing Supply Chains of high value at the expense of high resource requirements; or (ii) require low resources at the expense of producing Supply Chains of low value. In this paper we describe an algorithm that is able to produce Supply Chains of high value while keeping a low resource usage profile. Moreover, our method is able to produce near optimal Supply Chains while using up to four orders of magnitude less resources that the state-of-the-art.