Product and supply chain design using a two-phases optimisation approach

When designing a new product family, designers and manufacturers have to define simultaneously the product structure and its supply chain. This leads to a complex optimization problem to solve in order to satisfy diversified customers’ requirements with various options and variants. The paper focuses on modeling and solving this design problem. It consists in selecting a set of modules that will be manufactured in distant facilities and shipped in a nearby location plant for a final assembly operation under time limits. The objective is to determine the optimal set of modules able to define the bill of material of each finished product and to minimize assembly and production costs. We propose in this paper a two phase approach and an integrated one to solve this problem. We provide experiments on small instances in order to better understand the links between the product design and the supply chain design.