Progresses and challenges in process industry supply chains optimization

Process industry supply chains (SCs) involve challenging and complex problems that have been addressed by the process systems engineering community in recent years. Shah in 2005 (Shah N: Process industry supply chains: advances and challenges. Comput Chem Eng 2005, 29: 1225-1235. The paper provides a comprehensive review on the process industry supply chains. Discusses major achievements and explores industrial examples. Challenges are identified where the evidence that supply chains of the future will be quite different from the past is recognized) stated in his review that process industry SCs were still striving to improve efficiency and responsiveness and were facing new challenges that needed further research. Optimization was pointed out as a possible path to follow aiming at building tools that can help the involved decision makers. From that time onwards several works have explored this pathway but there is still space for improvement, especially due to the outer shell of new emerging problems. The present paper provides a brief review of the progress that has been made on process industry SCs focusing in recent years (2008 onwards). Conclusions on the work done are strained, while the tendencies and future challenges in the area are identified.