Simulation Research On Quantity-flexible Contract With Inventory Transshipment

In industries that characterized by highly uncertainty of demands and long production cycle, supply chain members need to establish long-term cooperation mechanism to promote effective sharing of resources and improve the rationality of supply chain resource allocation. In these ways, they can reduce the supply chain risk caused by demand uncertainty, improve the supply chain capabilities of fulfilling demands, and coordinate the supply chain in the end. As one of the supply chain contracts, quantity flexibility contract is common and easily implemented. So it's necessary to analyze the effects of this contract under markets characterized by different demand features. Also, considering the disadvantage of this contract, effective improves measures are needed.The theoretical researching scope in this thesis included supply chain contracts, distributed inventory, supply chain simulation and so on. The core researching contents and features of the application fields of quantity flexibility contract are summarized first of all. Then a new coordination approach by combining the quantity flexibility contract and inventory transshipment is proposed based on analyzing the common features of these two coordination methods. This new coordination approach is proved to be effective as a remedy of the incoordination.Modeling method based on MAS is firstly used in researching of the quantity flexibility contract. A supply chain model included four retailers and one capacitated supplier is established and simulated. The cost constructions of the supply chain members are analyzed detailedly. By a series of simulation experiments, the coordination effects of quantity flexible contract under markets characterized by different demand features are analyzed and the efficiency of combining this contract and inventory transshipment is verified.The results show that the advantages of the contract are more obvious when demand uncertainty is higher. Furthermore, the service levels and net incomes are higher when the contract is more flexible. But the role of quantity flexible contract on the supplier's side is very different. Although the service level of supplier is decline when quantity flexible parameter increasing in a small area, it meets customers' demands more effectively so the profit is indirectly improved. When increasing the quantity flexibility to a certain point, profit of the supplier starting to show a trend of downward. For the coordination effect of contract established under the formal influence doesn't turned out to be optimized, the supplier doesn't have the willing to over-improve quantity flexibility. Subsequent studies find that the introduction of inventory transshipment can be applied on the coordination basis of certain quantity flexibility contract to further optimize the performance of the supply chain and the retailer, but its optimal effect is relatively limited.