In order to strengthen competitiveness, the pool of available network sites in supply chains of processing industries with 24/7 operations should be adjusted permanently. However, an integration of additional sites is to be assessed thoroughly by the network managers as an exact coordination...

Purpose: Once a set of suppliers has been determined, according to criteria of quality, price and reliability, among others, there remains the problem of assigning orders to the selected suppliers, in order to cover the needs at the lowest cost. We consider the case in which the needs of a...