Study On The Inventory Routing Problem With Stochastic Demand

In recent years, the importance of SCM including purchasing, storing, transportation, material-allocation has been noticed and the SCM has become the key factor of enterprise's competitive advantage. However, the inventory control as well as transportation problem, the two important parts of supply chain, are studied separately in traditional supply chain management, which results in ignoring their interrelation and mutual influence. Each enterprise only seeks its maximal self interest and this situation is undoubtedly negative to the dominant place of the whole supply chain enterprises. A new inventory management method VMI has been put forwarded in recent years. This inventory management strategy breaks the traditional respective and separate inventory management mode, manages the inventory with the systematic and integrated thoughts, synchronizes the whole supply chain system, enhances the agility and responsibility of enterprises. resolves the problem of information contort in supply chain. Thus it solves the Bull-whip effect availably.The thought of VMI offers a new chance for suppliers to conquer the trade- off conflict between transportation and inventory and implement the goal of lowering the distribution cost by making overall plans of transportation and inventory. IRP becomes the brand new research field in demand of the solution to optimize the transportation and inventory simultaneously, and it is also the key question in the process of VMI. But how to make the effective inventory management and routing plans in order to meet the customer's demands is not a easy task. The operative plan maker will face more challenges especially in the condition of many customers and uncertain demands.With more attention to supply chain management, the research of IRP has been a hot topic in developed countries. But in our country, both the theoretic quest of IRP and the practical application of distribution strategy are weak, even weaker in the research of IRP which is closer to the customer's real stochastic demand. So this article tries to make a useful study of the IRP of customer's stochastic demand and arranges the following contents:Firstly, it introduces the background and the practical value of IRP. On the basis of analyzing and summarizing the relative literatures, this article introduces the object,...