A manufacturing supply chain optimization model for distilling process

In this paper, the model of an integrated manufacturing supply chain where multiple products are manufactured across multiple manufacturing plants with distilling process is considered. This kind of supply chain often arises in such manufacturing scenarios where the products are distilled from one raw material. To solve the problem.. we reformulate it as a minimum cost flow problem plus several bounded variables. Based on this reformulation, we show that the basis of the reformulated problem is closely related with the minimum cost flow problem and design a kind of network simplex method to get the integrated optimal solution of the problem. The efficiency of the method is also tested by our numerical experiments. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.