Joint Replenishment And Investment Evaluation Models For Fresh Products Based On RFID Technology

With the development of society and science of our country,people's living standards are rising steadily.The requirements for the safety and freshness of fresh products such as fresh vegetables,fruits and aquatic items are also getting higher and higher.Retailers are expected to sell fresh products in good conditions which have a longer fresh life,or do not begin to deteriorate immediately.These products are termed as non-instantaneous deteriorating products.In 2016,the quality and safety of fresh agricultural products are included in the '13th Five-Year' Plan,therefore,retailers make proper investment and inventory decisions as well as ensuring the freshness of products are of vital significance for improving customer service levels,increasing profits and saving social resources.With Radio Frequency Identification(RFID)as the core technology,the implementations of Internet of things on fresh products make possible to the automatic acquisition of data and improve the operation efficiency of the supply chain,moreover,the sensor network and embedded system can also help to timely monitor and intelligently control the proper temperature and humidity of the fresh product.It is not only an effective way to reduce the loss of fresh products,but also the key for tracking and tracing the fresh product.As a result,RFID has become one of the most important investment opportunities for fresh product enterprises.However,most of the researches on non-instantaneous deteriorating items are focused on the decision-making problem of a single item,furthermore,many organizations take a“wait and see”stance in the adoption of RFID investment.There are few researches on the normative RFID investment evaluation model.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to help managers to make better decisions on dealing with the replenishment of several non-instantaneous deteriorating items as well as making RFID technology investment in the competitive environment.So the operating cost,investment cost and deterioration cost could be minimized.The research work of this paper is mainly focused on the following four aspects:Firstly,we consider the joint replenishment problem of multiple non-instantaneous deteriorating fresh products.The idea of joint replenishment is integrated into the inventory problem of fresh products,and a multi-item joint replenishment model for non-instantaneous deteriorating items is developed,aiming to minimize the average ordering cost,holding cost and deteriorating cost.This problem is NP-hard,in particular,the non-instantaneous deterioration complicate the problem further.To solve this problem,a truncated Taylor series method is used to approximate the exponential terms of the objective function and a bounds-based heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the model.Numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.Secondly,we consider the joint replenishment and RFID investment optimization problem for non-instantaneous deteriorating fresh products.Three factors of RFID investment are identified and analyzed,and the values of RFID investment in supply chain are measured.Then a joint inventory and investment decision model for a single non-instantaneous deteriorating fresh product is established.The necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the optimal solutions are derived,and an iterative solution algorithm is designed to obtain the accurate optimal replenishment policy and the optimal RFID investment level.Then the single item inventory model based on RFID is extended to the multi-item situation.The experimental results show that when the demand is large,RFID can effectively demonstrate its advantages,and the multi-item joint replenishment can achieve cost savings of the system.Thirdly,we consider the joint replenishment problem for non-instantaneous deteriorating fresh products involving multiple suppliers offering quantity discounts.This model is extended from the single supplier JRP.For different suppliers offer different quantity discounts schedules,and the minor ordering cost is also dependent on the selection of suppliers,so the proposed model includes a supplier selection system and the joint replenishment programmes.These two issues are NP-hard,and the objective function is a piecewise function the expression of which is dependent on the value of the decision variables.Therefore,an improved moth-flame optimization algorithm is proposed to solve this NP-hard problem.The experimental results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the other five heuristic algorithms,proving the efficiency and stability of proposed improved algorithm.Finally,we consider the joint replenishment and RFID investment decision problem under multiple suppliers offering quantity discounts for non-instantaneous deteriorating fresh products.In this model,the assumption that deterioration rate is constant in the present study is relaxed to a generalized and arbitrary type,and three factors of RFID investment are introduced to the model.Some useful theoretical results have been framed to characterize the optimal solutions,and then the original objective function was simplified,reducing the difficulty of solving the problem.Therefore,the optimal joint replenishment policy and the optimal investment decision can be determined under multiple suppliers for non-instantaneous deteriorating fresh products.The experimental results show that the benefits of RFID technology are not only reflected in the efficiency improvement of a single product or a single operation process,but in the whole replenishment system.