In the modern supplier–customer relationship, Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is used to monitor the customer's inventory replenishment. Despite the large amount of literature on the subject, it is difficult to clearly define VMI and the main associated processes. Beyond the short-term pull system inventory replenishment often studied in academic works, partners have to share their vision of the demand, their requirements and their constraints in order to fix shared objectives for the medium/long-term. In other words, the integration of VMI implies consequences for the collaborative process that links each partner's different planning processes. In this article we propose a literature review of VMI. Based on the conceptual elements extracted from this analysis, we suggest a VMI macro-process that summarises both operational and collaborative elements of VMI.

The purpose of this paper is, on the one hand, to identify to define and classify customization requirements and, on the other hand, to evaluate how generic modeling and configuration assistance within the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) framew

During the winter, snowfalls may occur, producing potential problems for traffic management. These road crises might be reduced setting up a collaborative network of heterogeneous actors aiming to solve this critical situation. Because crises deal with a lot of information, an Information Decision Support System might be deployed. Our point of view is to design it through a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Thus, an unavoidable issue for designing such an IDSS concerns knowledge management. This paper aims at presenting and defining a Metamodel dealing with specific road crisis situations. This is the first result of the French project SIM-PeTra.

The Demand-Driven MRP (DDMRP) is a recent method focusing on manufacturing and distribution flows that is supposed to manage uncertainties better than traditional Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP). Nevertheless, this assertion has never been scientifically demonstrated. In this paper, a case study is investigated in order to objectively and quantitatively compare these two systems. A Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) approach is used to evaluate the impacts on systems behaviours regarding both management methods. The final goal of our work research is to objectivise the reality of the DDMRP benefits.