Supply chain management is concerned with the efficient integration of interconnected entities so that products are sourced, manufactured and distributed in the right quantities, to the right locations and at the right time, thus satisfying customer requirements at minimal total system cost. Such systems face complexity due to the multiple material and information flows. In this context, the Process System Engineering (PSE) community has an important role to play in addressing such complexity. Departing from a real-world process supply chain, the industrial gas supply chain, while considering existing PSE contributions, this paper discusses challenges in terms or modeling and implementation. This work also presents perspectives in supply chain management from the industrial and academic standpoints that ought to be explored by the PSE community.

Introduction

Supply chains (SC) are systems that comprise several entities placed in different geographical locations. These interconnected systems play a crucial role in organizations as they dictate product availability to the final consumer and consequently the financial success of the involved companies. The management of SC is complex due to the involvement of a large multiplicity of material and information flows, diversified characteristics of the associated entities and often-present conflicting objectives. Within the process industry, this is not an exception and process supply chains must be flexible, resilient and efficient while guaranteeing customers’ demands at minimum costs. Moreover, as the process industry is often associated with a high level of resource consumption and often deal with non-friendly environment processes and products, special attention to supply chain sustainability is required when managing such systems (Barbosa-Póvoa, 2014; Mota et al., 2018). To deal with such complexity and underlying challenges, both industrial and academic communities identify the application of Process Systems Engineering (PSE) tools as a path to follow (Grossmann, 2012). Such tools support the integration of supply chain decisions under uncertainty while minimizing risk, maximizing service levels, sustainability levels and simultaneously guaranteeing the main SC goals – profitable and reliable operation. The PSE community can contribute highly in the answer to such challenges (BarbosaPóvoa, 2014) by studying real-world supply chain problems. These span from strategic (e.g. Network Design in Cardoso et al., 2013 and Mitra et al., 2014a) to tactical (e.g. Planning in You and Grossmann, 2013 and Malinowski et al., 2018) and operational decisions (e.g. scheduling, routing and inventory management in Amaro and BarbosaPóvoa, 2008; Dong et al., 2014; and Zhang et al., 2015). Several reviews provide a detailed analysis of such challenges. Shah (2005) identified the main requirements of process supply chains, focusing on the pharmaceutical case. Papageorgiou (2009) provided a comprehensive review of the design and planning of process supply chains and Stephanopoulos and Reklaitis (2012) highlighted the past and future contributions of the PSE community in several areas, from which the supply chain study was identified as essential. Grossmann (2012) presented the enterprise–wide optimization concept and highlighted the need of developing optimization tools that explore the integration of decisions across the different operations along the supply chain, considering different levels of detail. Lainez et al. (2012) reviewed the pharmaceutical supply chain and Barbosa-Póvoa (2014) analyzed the published papers on process supply chain considering the multiple decision levels. Recently, Barbosa-Póvoa et al. (2018) reviewed sustainable supply chains and conclude that particularly (bio) process supply chains have been actively addressing sustainability issues, which nevertheless present a large set of research opportunities.