A practical supply-demand hub in industrial clusters : a new perspective

Purpose: This paper aims to optimize the interactions of businesses located within industrial clusters (ICs) by using a supply-demand hub in ICs (SDHIC) as a conjoint provider of logistics and depository facilities for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as producers, where all of these interactions are under supervision of a third-party logistics provider (3PL). Design/methodology/approach: To evaluate the values of SDHIC, three mathematical models are proposed, optimally solved via GAMS and then compared. Also, a “linear relaxation-based heuristic” procedure is proposed to yield a feasible initial solution within a significant shorter computational time. To illustrate the values of SDHIC, comprehensive calculations over a case study and generated sets of instances are conducted, including several sensitivity analysis. Findings: The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of SDHIC for SMEs via combining batches and integrating the holding space of inventories, while the outcomes of the case study are aligned with those obtained from random sample examples, which confirms the trueness of used parameters and reveals the applicability of using SDHIC in real world. Finally, several interesting managerial implications for practitioners are extracted and presented. Practical implications: Some of the managerial and practical implications are optimizing interactions of businesses involved in a supply chain of an IC containing some customers, suppliers and manufacturers and rectifying the present noteworthy gaps pertaining to the previously published research via using real assumptions and merging upstream and downstream of the supply chain through centralizing on storage of raw materials (supply echelon) and finished products (demand echelon) at the same place simultaneously to challenge a classic concept in which supply and demand echelons were being separately planned regarding their inventory management and logistics activities and showing the positive consequences of such challenge, showing the performance improvement of the proposed model compared to the classic model, by increasing the storing cost of raw materials and finished products, considering some disadvantages of using SDHIC and showing the usefulness of SDHIC in total, presenting some applied findings according to the obtained results of sensitivity analysis. Originality/value: The key contributions of this paper to the literature are suggesting a new applied mathematical methodology to the supply chain (SC) of ICs by means of a conjoint provider of warehousing activities called SDHIC, comparing the new proposed model with the two classic ones and showing the proposed model’s dominancy, showing the helpful outcomes of collaborating 3PL with the SMEs in a cluster, proposing a “linear relaxation-based heuristic” procedure to yield a feasible initial solution within a significant shorter computational time and minimizing total supply chain costs of such IC by optimum application of facilities, lands and labor.