Control and system-theoretic identification of the supply chain dynamics domain for planning, analysis and adaptation of performance under uncertainty

The analysis of how to achieve planned economic performance in a real-time, uncertain and perturbed execution environment is a vital and up-to-date issue in many supply chains. Although it is intuitive that uncertainty is likely to have impacts on performance, the research on systematic terminology and quantitative analysis in this domain is rather limited as compared with the well-established domain of supply chain optimal planning. This study is among the first to address the operative perspective of the supply chain dynamics domain. The methodology of this conceptual paper is based on the business and technical literature analysis and fundamentals of control and systems theory. In contributing to the existing studies in this domain, the paper proposes a possible systemization and classification of related terminology from different theoretical perspectives, and important practical problems. For the supply chain dynamics domain, the paper identifies and groups possible problem classes of research, corresponding quantitative methods, and describes the general mathematical formulations. The results of this study may be of interest to both academics and practitioners. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.