On the relationship between supply chain and transportation network equilibria: A supernetwork equivalence with computations

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the relationship between supply chain network equilibrium and transportation network equilibrium. We demonstrate that a supply chain network equilibrium model introduced earlier can be reformulated as a transportation network equilibrium model with elastic demands through a supernetwork reformulation of the former. This equivalence allows us to transfer the wealth of methodological tools developed for transportation network equilibrium modeling, analysis, and computation to the study of supply chain networks. To illustrate the power of the results, we then apply an algorithm developed for the solution of transportation network equilibrium problems with elastic demands to compute the product shipments and demand market prices in several numerical supply chain network examples taken from the existing literature.