Intelligent model design of cluster supply chain with horizontal cooperation

Abstract

Intelligent model design of complex system becomes a key issue for organization responsiveness to uncertainties. In the real business world, the rule of competition between one firm verse another is replaced by a chain verse another chain, the cooperation is the same, where does it occur? At industrial cluster, there are a multiple of rivals or potential competitors for each member of value chain, industrial cluster location not only contains a couple of focal firms locating at the same tier, but includes the corresponding upstream and downstream firms as well, all of which concentrate on a close geographical site. For adopting to ever-changing market and sever competition, it is most likely to form multiple paralleled single supply chains for each focal firm of industrial cluster, these paralleled single supply chains compete and cooperate with each other. Recent researches regarding supply chain design mainly focus on a limited tier in single supply chain, which only take into account vertical cooperation and ignore the across-chain horizontal one. This paper, based on cluster supply chain, provides a novel framework and approach to design cluster supply chain without across-chain horizontal cooperation, then by introducing item allocation proportion of vertical and horizontal cooperation (α: 1−α), the cluster supply chain design with across-chain horizontal cooperation is developed, then presents a hybrid method to find solution, at last, computational study is presented to investigate values of decision variables and their influence on cluster supply chain design.