Optimization Research On Terminal Delivery And Purchase&Sales Contract In Platform Upply Chain

With the advent of the digital economy and the continuous development of mobile Internet and Internet of Things technologies,online platform consumption has become more and more popular.The platform supply chain formed by an online selling platform as the core linking upstream supply firms and downstream consumers is the theoretical foundation and technical basis for ensuring the success of online platform consumption.Among them,the two key links that affect the stable and healthy operation of the platform supply chain are very important.That is,one is the selling contract between the members of the platform supply chain,the other is the logistics delivery and distribution system at the end of the platform supply chain.Based on that,the dissertation studied the platform supply chain in terms of the above two links,and we have obtained some meaningful results.Roughly speaking,this dissertation firstly targets the integration of large non-standard products in the logistics delivery and distribution business at the end of the platform supply chain.We developed a delivery scheduling solution to minimize the expected completion time of the given distribution tasks.Next,we turned to the study of the selling contract of the platform supply chain.For two common structures of the platform supply chain,the first is that there are two competing manufacturers/suppliers in the upstream.Under the unobservability of the contract specific terms,we investigated the changes in the firm members of the supply chain and the overall profits of the supply chain to find out and determine the best contract mode and specific terms.The second is to study how an upstream monopolistic manufacturer can strategically transform its selling contract mode on both online retail platforms and to identify the sufficient conditions that facilitate these transformations when there are two competing online retail platforms in the supply chain.Specifically,the main work and research results of this dissertation are as follows.Firstly,for the feature of integration of delivery and assembly of large nonstandard products in the platform supply chain logistics,to deal with the uncertainty of assembly time,we used probability constraints to characterize the uncertainty and then formulate a chance-constrained programming model.After obtaining the distribution characteristic of product assembly time via a statistical learning method based on the strength of real historical data from an enterprise partner,we transformed the chance-constrained optimization model into an equivalent deterministic optimization mode.A heuristic consisting of two sub-heuristics was developed to solve the resulting deterministic model.The first sub-heuristic,which incorporates a time sliding mechanism,is used to find a feasible solution,and the second one is used to search for a likely better solution.Finally,for our numerical experiments,we applied a real dataset provided by an industry enterprise to execute our model-solving algorithm and find that the solution scheme we obtain outperforms the firm’s current one with the performance improvement of 16.6%.We also compared the numerical results for the new method with three alternative meta-heuristics and found that our algorithm is superior to those metaheuristics regarding both result performance and computational time.Further,we also compared our heuristic with the traditional Savings+VNS and find that our heuristic provides better results than the traditional Savings+VNS.Finally,based on the results of the scheduling scheme we have provided,valuable managerial insights were provided for industry practice from three aspects:the heterogeneity of vehicle departure time,the economization of vehicle usage,and the balance of vehicle working time.Secondly,for the platform supply chain consisting of two upstream competing manufacturers and one downstream online retail platform.We considered two purchase sales contracts,namely wholesale price contract and two-part tariff contract.In the cases where the contract is observable and unobservable,a hybrid game model was established and solved using a perfect(refined)Bayesian equilibrium framework.We studied the optimal profit changes of each member in the supply chain when the two contracts are adopted.We found that,If the supply chain adopts traditional wholesale price contract,the profit of the retail platform is higher under the observability of contract than under the unobservability of contract.The profit of the two suppliers is higher under the unobservability of contract than that of observable situation.In the case of unobservable contract,the classical findings of the literature on the comparison of wholesale price contract and two-part tariff contract are no longer valid.However,when the contract is unobservable,both the supplier and the retail platforms prefer the wholesale price contract rather than the two-part tariff contract.The main reason behind these findings is the opportunistic deviation behavior for the upstream suppliers under the unobservable contract.Our research conclusions provide a novel explanation for the popularity of using of such concise wholesale price contract.Finally,for the platform supply chain containing one upstream manufacturer and two downstream competing online retail platforms(ORPs),we studied the strategic choice of selling contract for the manufacturer.We model and solve the problem using a hybrid game model.Results show that the competition intensity between the two ORPs and the order-fulfillment costs play important roles in the decision process of the manufacturer.More specifically,for a given competition intensity,with the order-fulfillment costs rise,the preferred mode for the manufacturer switches from the pure online marketplace contract mode to the hybrid contract mode and then to the pure reseller contract mode.For a given not too small order-fulfillment costs,with the downstream competition intensity increases,the best contract mode of the manufacturer moves from the pure online marketplace contract mode to the hybrid contract mode and then to the pure reseller contract mode.Finally,we extended the basic model by relaxing the assumptions about the same proportion fee rate and the fixed order-fulfillment cost.The intuition behind these findings comes from considering the trade-off between downstream price competition resulting from the shift of retail pricing power and the obligation of bearing the order-fulfillment costs.