Modelling long-term decisions to limit effects of market uncertainties

This paper proposes an alternative approach to handle uncertainties for both the plant-wide and the enterprise-wide optimization problems. Such an approach deals with the introduction of long-term policies and business strategies (e.g. tight supply contracts, take-or-pay agreements) into the classical supply chain problem. Contracts and agreements have more and more the task to reduce the effects of market demand and price volatilities and their integration in the typical mixed-integer models for supply chain optimization takes to reliable enterprise scheduling and planning. Technique validation and numerical comparison against status quo are proposed and discussed.