Quantitative models for supply chain planning under uncertainty: a review

Abstract

Managing uncertainty is a main challenge within supply chain management. Therefore, it is expected that those supply chain planning methods which do not include uncertainty obtain inferior results if compared with models that formalise it implicitly. This article presents a review of the literature related to supply chain planning methods under uncertainty. The main objective is to provide the reader with a starting point for modelling supply chain under uncertainty applying quantitative approaches. We have defined a taxonomy to classify models from 103 bibliographic references dated 1988–2007. Finally, some conclusions about the works analysed have been drawn and future lines of research have been identified.