In the course of globalization, many enterprises change their
strategies and are coupled in partnerships with suppliers,
subcontractors and customers. This coupling forms supply chains
comprising several geographically distributed production
facilities. Production planning in a supply chain is a complicated
and difficult task, as it has to be optimal both for the local
manufacturing units and for the whole supply chain network. In
this paper two analytical models are used to solve the production
planning problem in supply chain involving several enterprises.
Generally in practice, for competitive and/or practical reasons,
frequently each enterprise prefers to optimize its production plan
with little care about the other members of the supply chain. This
case is presented through a simple model of decentralized
optimization. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the
two types of optimization: centralized and decentralized. The
initial question is: what are the profit and the optimal policy of
global (centralized) optimization in contrast to local
(decentralized)? We characterize this gain by comparing the
optimal profits obtained in both cases.