Competition And Coordination For Supply Chain With A Deteriorating Item

Supply chain management(SCM) is a newly arisen managerial paradigm to adapt the rapid change of customer demand within the emerging world-wide manufacturing industry.SCM focuses on integration and coordination by considering a supply chain as a whole rather than a series of separate companies along the chain.A flexible and stable relationship of supply and demand will be realized by information sharing and operations coordination on logistics and cash flow among members in the chain.Deteriorating item of which the value decreases rapidly faces the challenge of quality preservation.It usually involves centralized production and distributed consumption.Because of the consumer's higher desire for the variety and freshness of the product and increasingly stricter administrative supervision in quality control, supply chain management with deteriorating item becomes extraordinarily important. Supply chain management with deteriorating item has been attracting wordwide academic and industrial attentions.The existence of abundant deterioration-related researches demonstrates the importance of such issue.Eatra emphasis still focuses on the optimal ordering and pricing policies.However,current researches are distributed in multiple areas and lack in a comprehensive systematically theoretical framework.Few researches involve theoretical analysis for competition and coordination between distributed supply chain companies with deteriorating items.Based on above thoughts,combining with supply chain coordinating theory, inventory management theory and game theory,this work focuses on the supply chain management of deteriorating products and investigates the competitive and cooperative relationship between upstream and downstream companies along a supply chain.This dissertation involves nine chapters.The content of each chapter is summarized as follows:Chapter 1 illuminates the research objectives and the adopted methodology,as well as the overall structure of this dissertation.Chapter 2 provides the knowledge preparation on supply chain inventory management first.Then the characteristics of deteriorating products are introduced and its research history is briefly tracked. Chapter 3 reviews the related literatures including:researches on supply chain inventory management with deteriorating items,studies for competition and coordination between supply chain members,and the applications of game theory in supply chain analysis.Chapter 4,in the settings of a typical distributed supply chain,adopts Nash game approach to analyze two-echelon supply chain with one manufacturer,one retailer and a single deteriorating item.The optimal pricing strategies for manufacturer and retailer in such settings are derived respectively.Moreover, comparasions are made detailedly with the optimal results of integrated system.Based on the previous chapter,Chapter 5 further analyzes the optimal pricing strategies in three different distributed competition environments and then makes comparasions between them via typical numeric examples.The impact of the deteriorating rate on decision-making is disclosed.Chapter 6 seeks to investigate the optimal competitive pricing and replenishment policies in a two-echelon supply chain with one manufacturer and one retailer for a single deteriorating item.The integrated models are extended firstly to a distributed scenario where the manufacturer and the retailer make their decisions independently and simultaneously.Second,the decision-makings of pricing and replenishment are integrated to balance a tradeoff.Third,the fact that the deterioration in retailer's inventory must be an indispensable part of the manufacturer's output is neglected in pre-research which makes their works less precise.This problem will be corrected in the section.The above researches are extended to a cold chain system in Chapter 7.By analyzing a two-echelon distributed supply chain,the optimal price and temperature policy is obtained.Game approach is employed to discuss the interactions between the manufacturer and the retailer,and the existence of Nash equilibrium is guaranteed.The results show that the sale price is more sensitive to the manufacturer's warehouse temperature when the price-sensitivity of customers is in a certain range.Finally,we illustrates that the cooperation in the temperature control can impressively increase the system's profit,but the motivation to cooperate for the manufacturer and the retailer is different if the deteriorating item is under a different temperature sensitive.In Chapter 8,for a supply chain with two deteriorating items,the optimal two-warehouse replenishment strategy and inventory control are discussed.Heuristic algorithm is employed to obtain the optimal replenishment strategy for retailer.The factors for the ratio of product in their own inventory and for replenishment strategy of each product are analyzed as well.The last chapter summarizes all the work of this dissertation and gives some useful suggestions for future researches.In brief,this research focuses on a distributed supply chain system with deteriorating items,and derives the optimal pricing and ordering strategies in the aforementioned conditions.It enables succinct and implementable approaches to solve the problem and enriches corresponding theoretical foundation.