Introduction

Supply chain planning is concerned with the determination of integrated operational plans for all functional areas and members within a supply chain. Depending on the organizational structure of the supply chain, this task can either be considered as the state-of-the-art or as a challenge for future supply chain excellence. State-of-the-art is the planning in intra-organizational supply chains. This task is supported by a broad range of procedures elaborated in the literature during the last decades as well as modeling tools, APS (Advanced Planning Systems), which are widely used by practitioners.1 This, however, is not the case for inter-organizational supply chains consisting of multiple, legally independent parties. Current APS only provide interfaces for data exchange between parties, but do not support inter-organizational collaborative planning. In APS, an integrated planning requires a (central) entity equipped with all relevant data and the decision authority to implement the systemwide optimal plan. However, this approach comes with a number of downsides: The need for disclosing potentially confidential information by the decentralized parties, the conflict of central targets with the incentive structure in decentralized organizations, and the missing guarantee for truthful information disclosure; indeed, very few applications of this approach have been reported so far.2