Supply Chain Network Design Including the Cost of Quality: A strategic model and solution procedures based on metaheuristics

The supply chain (SC) can be understood as the integration of all business entities that work together in order to ensure that the final client receives a product or service at the right time, in the right quality, and at low cost. To achieve this, it is necessary to coordinate all the business entities within a SC. This can be achieved through supply chain management (SCM). This book addresses one of the problems included in SCM which is supply chain network design (SCND). The design of a supply chain network aims at selecting the business entities that increase the overall performance of the SC. Cost of Quality (COQ) represents a powerful measurement system that translates the implications of poor quality into a monetary language. This work includes three main contributions: (1) the model internally computes the COQ for the whole SC considering the interdependencies among business entities; (2) the model can be used at a strategic planning level to design a logistic route that achieves a maximum profit while considering the quality level within a SC; and (3) solution methods based on metaheuristics are developed and computational experiments are performed.