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Abstract Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become one of the most powerful business concepts for organizations to gain a competitive advantage in the global market place. Organizations no longer compete as separate entities, but rather as integrated links in the Supply Chain. The present work addresses the distribution sector in SCM being one of the most important sectors having great impact on the overall costs of an organization. A mathematical approach is adopted to solve an important class of problems encountered in the design of distribution networks in a supply chain; that is the Location-Allocation (LA) problem. The Location-Allocation problem is concerned with answering the questions of which facilities to open, how much to store in each facility, and which customers to assign to each facility. A comprehensive review of literature has been made to provide an overview of Supply Chain Management (SCM), distribution network design in SCM, and the Location-Allocation problem in SCM. This review leads to the development of a Mixed Integer Programming (M1P) model that helps answer the questions implied by the Location-Allocation problem. |