Demand Fulfillment in Multi-Stage Customer Hierarchies

Customer segments form multi-level hierarchical trees in many supply chain planning problems. Sebastian Vogel provides a comprehensive formal overview of such multi-stage customer hierarchies and characterizes the corresponding demand fulfillment problem. Here, the process of quota reservation and allocation planning usually has to be performed iteratively. This is particularly difficult for decentral planners who have only limited information transparency. A new superior allocation scheme for decentral decision makers is derived which exploits the level of customer heterogeneity in sub-trees.