Coordination mechanisms with mathematical programming models for decentralized decision-making: a literature review

Abstract

The increase in the complexity of supply chains requires greater efforts to align the activities of all its members in order to improve the creation of value of their products or services offered to customers. In general, the information is asymmetric; each member has its own objective and limitations that may be in conflict with other members. Operations managements face the challenge of coordinating activities in such a way that the supply chain as a whole remains competitive, while each member improves by cooperating. This document aims to offer a systematic review of the collaborative planning in the last decade on the mechanisms of coordination in mathematical programming models that allow us to position existing concepts and identify areas where more research is needed.

A Framework for Capacity and Operations Planning in Services Organizations Employing Workers with Intellectual Disabilities

“…The integrated framework herein proposed adopts a hierarchical planning approach that encompasses four nested planning levels with different time horizons (annual, quarterly, biweekly, daily), as illustrated in Figure 1. However, contrarily to the production contexts in which coordination may be achieved with building inventories during shorter demand periods [46,48], in this case adequately planning training during shorter activity periods leads to a higher capacity whenever required. Therefore, hiring and dismissing processes-the usual leverages employed in aggregate planning-must be considered together with workers' training planning to ensure that the system is ready to satisfy clients' variable requirements.…”

Collaborative Distributed Planning with Asymmetric Information. A Technological Driver for Sustainable Development

“…Coordination mechanisms can be grouped into auctions, hierarchy, metaheuristics and mathematical decomposition [21]. Auctions are important coordination mechanisms that have been employed ever since the earliest times to allocate goods and services [30].…”

“…Sharing resources is increasingly easier, thanks to digitisation [19], regardless of the cooperation level, while organisations' increased resilience helps deal with the complexity of change, while preserving the capacity for development [20]. However, companies are reluctant to share their internal information, a requirement for a supply chain's centralised coordination [21]. Theoretically, centralised coordination through mathematical programming models ensures the possibility of reaching the cheaper solution on the whole and, consequently, the most sustainable operation planning by making the use of global resources efficient and sustainable independently of shared resources existing [22].…”

“…Therefore, decisions are made under uncertainty, because perhaps not all information is known, or known with certainty, at the decision-making time. A recent literature review on coordination mechanisms for decentralised decision making [21] concluded that studies that cover the analysis of coordination mechanisms in multiperiod contexts and, more precisely, in decentralised settings with multiple independent decision makers were lacking [27].…”

A combined approach for modeling multi-echelon multi-period decentralized supply chain

“…Compared with the literature on centralized SC systems, that on decentralized ones is less extensive. Detailed reviews of the coordination mechanisms of SC systems with separate and independent economic entities that can be found in Li and Wang (2007) and Rius-Sorolla et al (2020) highlight the research opportunities for coordinating a decentralized SC. In this paper, firstly, a literature review of SC modeling using decentralized strategies from different aspects is focused on and, subsequently, the research gaps in this field are presented.…”