Modelling and analysis of a four stage supply chain under fuzzy environment

In today's competitive arena, the success of supply chain depends on its managerial ability to integrate and coordinate all stages of the supply chain. The supply chain predominantly consists of four stages in a typical industry, namely: suppliers, manufacturing plants, warehouses, and retailers. Supply chain shall be viewed as multi-objective decision making problem. The objectives include minimisation of cost at suppliers, plants, warehouses and retailers. Fuzzy goal programming approach is useful to solve multi-objective decision making problems. In this paper, the multiple objectives of the supply chain are aggregated using Werner's (1998) compensation operator (γ) and compromise solutions on the decisions of the supply chain is arrived. Risk analysis is performed over the optimised model and the effect of uncertainty in terms of increase in suppliers' price is studied. Fuzzy goal programming model was solved using LINGO 8 software.