| This dissertation takes into account the latest industrial trends in integrated logistical management and focuses on recent supply chain initiatives enabling the coordination of supply chain entities. The specific initiatives of interest rely on carefully designed transportation and supply contracts such as Vendor Managed Inventory applications. With such new initiatives, substantial savings are realizable by carefully coordinating the operational decisions, such as procurement, transportation, inventory, and production decisions, for different cooperating entities in the supply chain. The impact is particularly tangible when coordinated policies address channel coordination issues between these entities.; This dissertation first provides a critical review and comparative analysis of the literature on buyer-vendor coordination problems. Recognizing a need for analytical research in the field, the dissertation then develops and solves centralized and decentralized models for complex buyer-vendor coordination problems with applications in supply/replenishment and transportation/delivery contract design. The two specific classes of problems considered include (i) buyer-vendor coordination under generalized replenishment costs, and (ii) buyer-vendor coordination under depreciating economic value of items. Under these considerations, the dissertation also develops efficient coordination algorithms and new mechanisms for effective channel coordination. |
