Logistics and Supply Chain Management

This chapter focuses on the role of facility location under uncertainty in logistics and supply chain management. Several prototype models are discussed, gathering relevant elements of practical relevance, including multiple facility echelons, multiple products or families of products, and time-dependent decisions. This comes along with two relevant aspects: resilience and sustainability. The first requires careful anticipation of potential disruptions in the underlying network and the development of mechanisms for efficiently and effectively overcoming them. The second is aligned with the vision of a progressively more circular economy, ensuring that reverse logistics operations complement the forward ones, thus contributing to a better utilization of the available resources while preserving the environment. Financial risk and supply chain risk analytics are concepts also discussed in this chapter. Humanitarian supply chains call for specific types of decisions, objective functions, and constraints. These are also discussed. The chapter also covers particular families of problems, such as those resulting from gathering the elements discussed in the previous chapters.