Supply chains are everywhere that people do business, from a single market stall by the side of a road to a multinational corporation. Wherever there are goods and services that need to be used in a scheduled way to create a product that will be sold.
The problem that this thesis addresses is to manage a subset of supply chains; those that the participants of can be connected to electronically via the Internet, and to automatically optimize the flows between multiple supply chains. The methods used are a collection of heuristic rules for routing supply chain flow, a software engine to work through these rules and send messages to web services that encapsulate supply chain entities and a web based interface to view and measure the overall supply chain efficiencies.
The preliminary results show that some supply chains can be managed electronically, and it is possible to squeeze savings in time and money, by managing supply chain flow automatically, and that heuristic rules could work as well as the Simplex method in optimizing multiple supply chains.