Patent ID: 7917379

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for solving a supply chain planning problem, comprising: decompositioning said supply chain planning problem into a plurality of independent sub-problems, said supply chain planning problem comprising a plurality of planning problems, at least one of said plurality of planning problems is a service level planning problem, wherein said supply chain planning problem further comprises computing at least one safety stock limit for an item; providing a plurality of distributed database partitions, each partition of said plurality of distributed database partitions associated with a respective independent sub-problem of said plurality of planning problems; operating a plurality of processors, each processor of said plurality of processors coupled with a respective partition of said plurality of distributed database partitions; forming a plurality of distributed sub-problem partitions, each of said distributed sub-problem partitions including a plurality of related items and associated with a respective independent sub-problem of said plurality of planning problems; loading data into a plurality of distributed database partitions, said data associated with said plurality of related items, and each of said distributed database partitions associated with a respective one of each of said distributed sub-problem partitions; and solving each of said plurality of said independent sub-problems by each processor of said plurality of processors coupled with said respective partition of said plurality of distributed database partitions, wherein each processor of said plurality of processors is operating in parallel.