Summary and Outlook

This thesis has proposed new supply chain coordination mechanisms, which incorporate a number of characteristics favoring their applicability in practice. The mechanisms can coordinate plans generated on the basis of complex mathematical programming models on behalf of self-interested parties holding private information, and do not require the participation of a third party. In the literature, all of these characteristics have been regarded as important, but they have never been covered within a single approach. An introduction to the research problem tackled by this thesis is given in Chap. 2. There, we have presented mathematical models for (intra-organizational) mid-term supply chain planning (Master Planning) as well as basic definitions that are used throughout this work. Moreover, we have shown how to model inter-organizational planning processes formally. Last, we have determined drivers for suboptimalities without coordination, which, e.g., result from the application of myopic procedures such as upstream planning.