Effects of Reconfigurations for Multi-period Production Planning under Demand Uncertainty

We address the effects of the exchanges of leader-follower relationship to the multi-period supply chain planning under demand uncertainty. Most of conventional works assume that the leader-follower relations for multiple companies are treated as constant in all time periods. However, in order to accommodate changes caused by uncertainties, it is necessary to develop reconfigurable supply chain that can flexibly change its structure of supply chain according to the dynamical changes of manufacturing environment. In this paper, a multi-period supply chain planning model that can change the structure of supply chain over time periods under uncertainty is developed. We provide a novel production planning model that can effectively determine the optimal configuration of leader-follower relationship in the bilevel supply chain planning problem. Then, the total profit of the supply chain is analyzed by a game theoretical analysis. The effects on the change of configurations are investigated from computational experiments.