This doctoral thesis deals with possibilities of using advanced methods of decision-making - Soft Computing, in company’s ordering cycle management. The main aim of the thesis is to propose an artificial neural network model with an optimal architecture for ordering cycle management within the supply chain management. The proposed model will be employed in an organization involved in retailing to ensure smooth material flow. A design and verification of artificial neural networks model for sales prediction is also part of this doctoral thesis as well as a comparison of results and usability with standard and commonly used statistical methods. Furthermore, the thesis deals with finding a suitable artificial neural network model with architecture capable of solving the lot-size problem according to specified inputs. Methods of statistical data processing, economical modelling and advanced decision-making (Soft Computing) were utilized during the model designing process.

In this thesis, we study three supply chain planning problems. The first two problems fall in the tactical planning level, while the third one falls in the strategic/tactical level. We present a direct application for the first two planning problems in the wind turbines industry. For the third problem, we show how it can be applied to supply chains in the food industry. Many countries and localities have the explicitly stated goal of increasing the fraction of their electrical power that is generated by wind turbines. This has led to a rapid growth in the manufacturing and installation of wind turbines. The globally installed capacity for the manufacturing of different components of the wind turbine is nearly fully utilized. Because of the large penalties for missing delivery deadlines for wind turbines, the effective planning of its supply chain has a significant impact on the profitability of the turbine manufacturers. Motivated by the planning challenges faced by one of the world’s largest manufacturers of wind turbines, we present a comprehensive tactical supply chain planning model for manufacturing of wind turbines in the first part of this thesis. The model is multi-period, multi-echelon, and multi-commodity. Furthermore, the model explicitly incorporates backorder penalties with a general cost structure, i.e., the cost structure does not have to be linear in function of the backorder delay. To the best of our knowledge, modeling-based supply chain planning has not been applied to wind turbines, nor has a model with all the above mentioned features been described in the literature. Based on real-world data, we present numerical results that show the significant impact of the capability to model backorder penalties with general cost structures on the overall cost of supply chains for wind turbines. With today’s rapidly changing global market place, it is essential to model uncertainty in supply chain planning. In the second part of this thesis, we develop a two-stage stochastic programming model for the comprehensive tactical planning of supply chains under supply uncertainty. In the first stage, procurement decisions are made while in the second stage, production, inventory, and delivery decisions are made. The considered supply uncertainty combines supplier random yields and stochastic lead times, and is thus the most general form of such uncertainty to date. We apply our model to the same wind turbines supply chain. We illustrate theoretical and numerical results that show the impact of supplier uncertainty/unreliability on the optimal procurement decisions. We also quantify the value of modeling uncertainty versus deterministic planning. Supplier selection with quantity discounts has been an active research problem in the operations research community. In this the last part of this thesis, we focus on a new quantity discounts scheme offered by suppliers in some industries. Suppliers are selected for a strategic planning period (e.g., 5 years). Fixed costs associated with suppliers’ selection are paid. Orders are placed monthly from any of the chosen suppliers, but the quantity discounts are based on the aggregated annual order quantities. We incorporate all this in a multi-period multi-product multi-echelon supply chain planning problem and develop a mixed integer programming (MIP) model for it. Leading commercial MIP solvers take 40 minutes on average to get any feasible solution for realistic instances of our model. With the aim of getting high-quality feasible solutions quickly, we develop an algorithm that constructs a good initial solution and three other iterative algorithms that improve this initial solution and are capable of getting very fast high quality primal solutions. Two of the latter three algorithms are based on MIP-based local search and the third algorithm incorporates a variable neighborhood Descent (VND) combining the first two. We present numerical results for a set of instances based on a real-world supply chain in the food industry and show the efficiency of our customized algorithms. The leading commercial solver CPLEX finds only a very few feasible solutions that have lower total costs than our initial solution within a three hours run time limit. All our iterative algorithms well outperform CPLEX. The VND algorithm has the best average performance. Its average relative gap to the best known feasible solution is within 1% in less than 40 minutes of computing time.

La thèse est composée de deux parties. La première partie traite de la gestion des qualifications dans l'industrie des semi-conducteurs. La contrainte de qualification définit l'éligibilité d'une machine à processer un produit. La gestion des qualifications nécessite de résoudre un problème d'allocation et d'équilibrage des charges sur des machines parallèles non-identiques et partiellement reconfigurables. Nous avons défini et introduit des indicateurs pour la gestion des qualifications en tenant compte de la capacité des équipements ainsi que la contrainte de regroupements de lots (batching). Plusieurs algorithmes d'équilibrage de charge sont proposés et validés pour le calcul de la charge optimale sur un parc d'équipements. Ce concept est industrialisé au sein de l'entreprise Soitec et fait partie du processus de prise de décision.La deuxième partie de la thèse porte sur la planification de production en boucle fermée. Le processus de fabrication des plaques SOI à Soitec s'appuie sur la Technologie Smart-Cut. En utilisant cette technologie, une des deux matières premières peut être réutilisée à plusieurs reprises pour la fabrication des produits finis. Le couplage de deux lignes de production crée un système manufacturier en boucle fermée. Nous avons proposé un modèle de dimensionnement de lots original pour la planification de production de ce système manufacturier, que nous avons validé avec des données industrielles. En se basant sur le problème industriel, un problème mono-produit et sans contrainte de capacité est défini, analysé et résolu pour une version simplifiée du problème. / In the first part, we take a binding restriction, called qualification, present in semiconductor manufacturing as a lever for increasing flexibility and optimizing capacity utilization. A qualification determines the processing authorization of a product on a machine (like an eligibility constraint). In order to define the best qualification, the production volume should be allocated to parallel non-identical machines which are partially reconfigurable. Capacitated flexibility measures are introduced to define the best qualification which increases machine capacity utilization at most. Batching is another industrial constraint encountered in semiconductor industry. It influences workload balancing and qualification management. Several workload balancing algorithms are proposed to find the optimal workload balance of a workcenter. Variability measures are also proposed to evaluate the workload variability of a workcenter. The second part deals with closed-loop production planning. Soitec uses Smart-Cut Technology to fabricate SOI wafers. Using this technology, one of the two raw materials used to fabricate SOI wafers can be reused several times to make other SOI wafers. However, before coming back to the SOI fabrication line, the used raw material (by-product) must be reworked in another production line. An original closed-loop production planning model adapted to the supply chain specificities of Soitec is proposed, and is validated using industrial data. Based on this industrial model, a single-item uncapacitated closed-loop lot-sizing model is defined, analyzed, and a dynamic programming algorithm is proposed for a simplified version of the problem.