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. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.