Jacques Lamothe

An optimization model for selecting a product family and designing its supply chain

When designing a new family of products, designers and manufacturers must define the product family and its supply chain simultaneously. At the very first step of the design process, designers propose various solutions for the set of variants of a product family and their bill-of-materials. The second step is to select some of these variants while choosing the architecture of the supply chain. A mixed integer linear programming model is investigated that optimizes the operating cost of the resulting supply chain while choosing the product variants. This work is applied to the problem of an automotive supplier.

A review of Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI): from concept to processes

In the modern supplier–customer relationship, Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is used to monitor the customers inventory replenishment. Despite the large amount of literature on the subject, it is difficult to clearly define VMI and the main associated processes. Beyond the short-term pull system inventory replenishment often studied in academic works, partners have to share their vision of the demand, their requirements and their constraints in order to fix shared objectives for the medium/long-term. In other words, the integration of VMI implies consequences for the collaborative process that links each partners different planning processes. In this article we propose a literature review of VMI. Based on the conceptual elements extracted from this analysis, we suggest a VMI macro-process that summarises both operational and collaborative elements of VMI.

Scheduling rules to minimize total tardiness in a parallel machine problem with setup and calendar constraints

Quality control lead times are one of most significant causes of loss of time in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. This is partly due to the organization of laboratories that feature parallel multipurpose machines for chromatographic analyses. The testing process requires long setup times and operators are needed to launch the process. The various controls are non-preemptive and are characterized by a release date, a due date and available routings. These quality processes lead to significant delays, and we therefore evaluate the total tardiness criterion. Previous heuristics were defined for the total tardiness criterion, parallel machines, and setup such as apparent tardiness cost (ATC) and ATC with setups (ATCS). We propose new rules and a simulated annealing procedure in order to minimize total tardiness.

A road crisis management metamodel for an information decision support system

During the winter, snowfalls may occur, producing potential problems for traffic management. These road crises might be reduced setting up a collaborative network of heterogeneous actors aiming to solve this critical situation. Because crises deal with a lot of information, an Information Decision Support System might be deployed. Our point of view is to design it through a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Thus, an unavoidable issue for designing such an IDSS concerns knowledge management. This paper aims at presenting and defining a Metamodel dealing with specific road crisis situations. This is the first result of the French project SIM-PeTra.

Product Family and Supply Chain Design

When designing a new family of products, designers and manufacturers must define the product family and its supply chain simultaneously. At the very first step of the design process, designers propose solutions of product decompositions. The second step is to select some of these decompositions while choosing the architecture of the supply chain. A mixed integer linear programming model is investigated that optimizes the operating cost of the resulting supply chain while choosing the product decompositions. This work is applied to an industrial problem of an automotive supplier.

A meta-ontology for knowledge acquisition and exploitation of collaborative social systems

Designing and/or managing collaborative social systems are obviously a complicated task, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the partners involved in terms of objectives, resources, information systems and so on. Whatever approach is adopted to support the collaboration (Mediation Information System, Peer-to-peer, Centralized Information System, etc.), one unavoidable issue is Knowledge Management. Gathering, formalizing and exploiting all the knowledge and information concerning a given collaborative situation is a critical requirement. In such a context, information and knowledge are widely distributed and the resources are classically not efficiently organized and utilized. A conceptualization is thus required to make the knowledge of the relations among the stakeholders explicit. This research work aims to provide a shared and common understanding of the management of collaboration, in order to be able to design and monitor future Decision-Making Support Tools and/or Collaborative Information Systems. Practically, the research works develops a generic meta-model and its ontology able to characterize a collaborative context and associated behaviors. All this knowledge is summarized through a Collaboration Meta-Ontology (CMO). Being in a formal format, the CMO provides partners with the means for acquiring, sharing and reasoning about collaborative information and knowledge. An illustration on the case of collaborative emergency management systems is developed.

Handling soft constraints in hoist scheduling problems: the fuzzy approach

The Hoist Scheduling Problem (HSP) deals with the scheduling of hoists that move products between tanks in electroplating facilities that perform chemical surface treatments. In HSP, the gradual effect of soaking times (operation duration in tanks) on the quality of treatment can be represented by means of fuzzy sets: the satisfaction degree in a fuzzy interval models a quality evaluation of the chemical treatment. When temporal bounds are required, an implicit relaxation of these flexible constraints can thus be performed so as to meet the due-date. When the objective is rather a minimization of the makespan, a bi-criteria decision problem has to be dealt with that involves both the quality and the line throughput optimization. Rather than an aggregation of the two evaluations under the form of a single criterion, we propose a decision-support approach that quickly converges to a good trade-off between the two criteria.

Cooperation to Reduce Risk in a Telecom Supply Chain

The telecom market is highly unpredictable and evolves at a very fast rate, making it extremely difficult to forecast demand accurately. These characteristics of the telecom supply chain lead to a high level of risk. One of the possible solutions for better decision making and improvement of local and global performance is the establishment of cooperative relationships within the chain. Our article presents a system and implementation methodology that aims to evaluate the risks of the actors′ behaviors (resource planning strategies, production and supply control strategies, and information sharing strategies) on the performance of the individual supply chain actors and of the supply chain as a whole. This risk is evaluated according to the level of the risk attraction of the decision maker and a risk evaluation diagram is provided to the decision maker.

A PaaS to Support Collaborations through Service Composition

The French project OpenPaaS aims at providing a social platform to help companies initiating and managing their collaborations. Nowadays, data exchange is no sufficient and collaborations need to be supported for every interaction between the actors of the collaboration. This paper concerns a PaaS in charge of supporting the deduction of collaborative business processes that involve subscribing organizations of the PaaS. In order to be applicable to industrial needs, the process deduction should require the minimum knowledge from users: collaborative objectives and a repository of all the capabilities made available by the subscribing organizations. Functional and non-functional gaps are filled simultaneously when building the process: (i) a collaborative ontology allows finding sets of capacities able to achieve the collaborative objectives and (ii) a non-functional assessment builds the optimal process i.e. the sequences of activities and also the set of partners with their corresponding capabilities. This article focuses on the first point and brings a methodology based on semantics to deduce a collaborative process.

A business process oriented method to design supply chain performance measurement systems

While performance management forms an integral part of the concept of supply chain management, designing a consistent and powerful performance measurement system (PMS) at the level of an enterprise network is still proving very problematic. In this paper, a business process oriented approach is proposed to tackle problems of heterogeneity between partners. Special attention is paid to the representation of both decisional and operational activities, taking into account the links between them. Based on this framework, a method is applied to select, implement and publish the key performance indicators (KPI). We propose a classification of KPI into three categories related to management abilities: ambition, reality and facility. These classes form a consistent set to support decision making and process control at a network level. A business case is used to show the potential of this approach.