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In a recent article, A. Ardalan presented a heuristic for service facility location. This heuristic is the Add heuristic of Kuehn and Hamburger, originally applied to warehouse location. Extensive results are known about the theoretical and practical performance of this heuristic, which applies to service facility location only when a global utility criterion can be used.

An attempt is made to classify the lot‐sizing problem based on evidence from the literature and current research trends. For future research a mixture of a heuristic method to find a sequence and cycle time and a mathematical program to find lot sizes would be feasible even for fairly large problems. Attempts should be made to apply marginal analysis in practical lot‐sizing problems since it may result in lower cost solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the issues, tradeoffs, and models relating to two important sets of problems that arise in supply chain management – complexities in extended supply chains and network coordination in globally dispersed supply chains. This paper highlights the role of logistics in enhancing the competitiveness of firms that operate a global supply chain.

The methodology used in this paper encompasses conceptual research and detailed literature review of key issues.

This review indicates that the key challenges faced by supply chain managers due to extended supply chains are non‐stationary demand, variability propagation, and inventory imbalances. For network coordination managers must determine the role of facilities in a global network, identify the optimal location and capacity of facilities as well as role of consolidation hubs. For the above challenges, the tradeoffs in terms of four key drivers of supply chain performance – transportation, inventory, information, and facilities and relate these to key measures of supply chain performance are described. Important directions for future research are also identified.

Test cases are needed to validate and refine the framework presented. Developing case studies that gather appropriate data to test out the models described would be important.

Companies with a global supply chain as well as third party logistics companies will find the framework presented in this paper very useful.

A new integrated framework that incorporates key decision issues like complexities of extended supply chains and network coordination into the firm's decision making has been presented. This has not been reported in previous research.

The literature on the facilities location problem is quite extensive with a wide variety of solution methods for addressing these problems where the objective is cost minimization. Develops a branch and bound algorithm for solving the uncapacitated, multi‐period facility location problem where the objective is to maximize profits. The solution method uses a number of simplification and branching decision rules to solve the problem efficiently. Extensive computational results on the algorithm’s performance are provided. The results indicate that the algorithm provides optimal solutions in substantially less time than LINDO.

Rapid changes in today’s global markets are forcing businesses to re‐examine and improve the ways they compete. Integration of facility location decisions in global marketing and manufacturing strategies provides an important means for firms to compete in global markets. This paper proposes that manufacturing utility can be related to marketing utility through facility location decisions. Consequently, it presents a mathematical model for global facility location that integrates marketing and manufacturing decisions in a global context. It also presents a four‐stage evolutionary model that can guide managers in making global facility location decisions.

For many years, facilities location problems have attracted a great deal of attention in the literature. As a result, there is now a variety of methods for solving these problems. However, due to the recent interest, little research is found relating to the issues concerning international facilities location problems. Furthermore, in spite of the extensive modelling work done on facilities location, little modelling research exists on location problems. Provides a capacitated multi‐period, 0‐1 mixed integer programming formulation for the international facilities location problem and discusses its applications to an actual company case. This application is carried out to demonstrate not only how the model can be applied in practice but also to show its potential benefits when compared to other methods.

Despite a growing body of research on the problem of increasing disaster preparedness by pre-positioning relief supplies at strategic locations, there is a lack of a benchmark set of problem instances that hinders thorough hypotheses testing, sensitivity analysis, model validation or solution procedure evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by constructing a public library of diverse pre-positioning problem instances.

By carefully manipulating some of the instance parameters, the authors generated 30 case studies that were inspired by four instances collected from the literature that focus on disasters of different type and scale that occurred in different parts of the world. In addition, the authors developed a tool to algorithmically generate arbitrarily many diverse random instances of any size.

For many purposes, the problem library can eliminate or reduce the time-consuming process of data collection, conversion, digitization, calibration and validation, while simultaneously increasing the statistical significance of research results and allowing comparison with different works in the literature.

The case studies are inspired by only four disasters, and some of the instance parameters are defined in a reasonable, albeit arbitrary way. The instances are also limited by the underlying problem assumptions.

The instances provide a more comprehensive and balanced experimental setting (compared to a single case study) that can be used to study the pre-positioning and related problems, or derive managerial implications that can directly benefit the practitioners.

The instances can be used to derive practical guidelines that humanitarian workers can use on the ground to better plan their pre-positioning strategies and therefore minimize human suffering.

The case studies and the random instance generator are made publicly available to foster further research on the problem of pre-positioning relief supplies and humanitarian logistics in general.

A comprehensive review of the literature for the problem of lot‐size scheduling (serial and assembly) considering the uncapacitated problem and complicated capacitated assembly manufacturing structure. Analyses the different solution techniques and findings for each product set.