Strategic design of flexible automotive production networks

The main planning challenges faced in global manufacturing strategy are the provision of capacity and flexibility to respond to uncertain product life cycles on markets fragmented by local content requirements. This thesis presents planning metho-dologies for the design of flexible automotive production networks with a focus on: - Contingent capacity and technology choice to hedge against demand uncertainty. - Network design to facilitate cost-efficient production, sourcing, and local content averaging. - Anticipating bargaining mechanisms in distributed production networks.