Performing solution of market-driven optimization for large-scale corporates

Many projects to rationalize and optimize the supply chain of complex corporates are ongoing in United States and Europe. The leitmotif is the high potential margins that may come from a high level optimization of decentralized productions and distribution networks, but also the need to raise the decision-making level from plantwide's purpose to the enterprise wide level. Actually, the global crisis of these last years is strongly pushing towards global optimization since the single production sites, although optimized, present relevant economic losses and the net operating margins are very small with respect to several years ago, especially in chemical and process industries. Thus, the corporate optimum, which almost never corresponds to the optimum of the single production sites, is a promising way to significantly improve the profits as well as to debottleneck inefficiencies highlighting and exploiting hidden potentialities. The main problem is that such an approach unavoidably means to optimize in an integrated way all the operations of the corporate and, hence, to account simultaneously for billions of variables and to elaborate a solution in real-time for the optimal decision support. Science fiction for the large industries, at least until computers will not be enough powerful, the parallel computing enough exploited, and the algorithms enough robust and efficient at the same time.