Research On The Multi-Echelon Multi-Period Inventory Control Based On Collaborative Supply Chain

With the highly developed science and technology, rapidly developed information technology and greatly changed market competition, supply chain management has become the key strategic competition resource of enterprise. Vendor Managed Inventory comes forth, for suiting for the new state of managing demand. As an inventory control strategy under supply chain, VMI connects the company in the supply chain and avoids the Problems such as asymmetric information, big forecast errors, long lead time and high Inventory costs engendered under the traditional management models. The buyers share the forecasting data and information of inventory with the vendors in the VMI model, and then by controlling the inventory with systematic and integrated management, the supply chain can work synchronously and efficiently.The problem of supply chain inventory characterized with complexity, dynamicity, time delay and periodicity.The traditional method deal with this kind of problem only in the static view, and do not consider the interaction within the system ,which abstract the model of the supply chain inventor as a mathematic model. Collaborative supply chain showed a lot of advantages on the study of the supply chain inventory management,whch not pursuit rigorous mathematical logic,not adhering to the optimal solution and the assumption but basing the real word on the premise ,considering the complexity , randomicity and dynamicity to search for methods and strategies to improve the system behaviors.The subjects of study for this paper is two-echelon supply chain composed of retailer and manufacturer.Firstly, on the basis of the system structure and operation workflow, this paper built Vendor managed inventory systematic model and traditional inventory management systematic model.Secondly, by the method of the system dynamics, and quantitatively described the dynamic behaviors of vendor managed inventory system and traditional inventory management system. At last, by measuring quantity of simulation datas, the paper compared VMI system performance with the traditional inventory system.