A Critical Review of Production Distribution Planning Models

The overall performance of supply chain depends on key choices with respect to demand allocation, facilities location, production strategy formulation, stock management and distribution plan. Among these the production-distribution planning has major impact on a company's performance. Production-distribution plan integrates production, transportation, warehousing, inventory and distribution. Over the past two decades the optimization of integrated production-distribution plan has created wide interest and scope among the research and academicians dealing with supply chain management. The paper focuses on primary characteristics pertaining to production-distribution plan since it has remarkable impact on the company's financial accountability. The present paper makes a thematic study on the collaborative production-distribution plan and solution methods with special emphasis on non traditional optimisation techniques, simulation and mathematical techniques adopted by researchers. Lastly, the paper paves the way for the future scope of research in integrated production-distribution planning.