Globalization and growing supply chain interconnectivity have led to greater complexity, uncertainty, and vulnerability in supply chains. Concequently, supply chains must become smarter to confront these challenges. The smarter supply chain has shown great promise; however, the business, policy, and technical challenges must be addressed before changes can be made. A literature review was performed to synthesize the studies on smarter supply chain management. The proior literature has been categoried into four aspect, including information sharing and supply-demand forecasting, smarter supply chain process integration and smarter decision-making, smarter supply chain risk management, and smarter supply chain collaboration. The successful practices and existing solutions for smarter supply chain management are also presented, which could serve as references for enterprises. The review concludes with a discussion of several research topics for futher work on smarter supply chain management.

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In the spot market for air cargo, airlines typically adopt dynamic pricing to tackle demand uncertainty, for which it is difficult to accurately estimate the distribution. This study addresses the problem where a dominant airline dynamically sets prices to sell its capacities within a two-phase sales period with only partial information. That partial information may show as the moments (upper and lower bounds and mean) and the median of the demand distribution. We model the problem of dynamic pricing as a distributional robust stochastic programming, which minimizes the expected regret value under the worst-case distribution in the presence of partial information. We further reformulate the proposed non-convex model to show that the closed-form formulae of the second-stage maximal expected regret are well-structured. We also design an efficient algorithm to characterize robust pricing strategies in a polynomial-sized running time. Using numerical analysis, we present several useful managerial insights for airline managers to strategically collect demand information and make prices for their capacities in different market situations. Moreover, we verify that additional information will not compromise the viability of the pricing strategies being implemented. Therefore, the method we present in this paper is easier for airlines to use.