A Joint Decision-making Of Chain Store Location And Distribution Center Selection In Supply Chain

In China, while considerable progress has been made in chain store operations in recent years, many problems still exist along with its irresistible grow speed. After China's entering in WTO, much business, including retailing, is confronted with fierce competition from many multi-national corporations. At the same time, brand-new management patterns and operation concepts are introduced to our retailing industry. As China promised, the whole distribution field had been fully opened to the world at the end of 2004. Thus, it is a vital task for us to develop and complete industry, such as retailing and service business, with limited time and borrowed advanced foreign experience. It has great significance to guide the development of our retailing and service industry with the chain store operation theory.Though remarkable progresses have been made in our retailing industry, many related corporations failed in operations. While many reasons are cited, the most important one comes to the inappropriate location of business. In the west, some people hold a view that the key of a successful retailing industry is 'place, place, place'. So, we can say that chain store is a location industry. Material shows that it takes a foreign businessman about one year doing investigations before he places another new store, while in china, a certain number of people just do some general feasibility analysis instead of detailed investigation. The skin-deep imitation of foreign corporations leads to many problems in the process of operation, consequently influence store's profit and ordinary operation.This paper has made a deeper consideration on the whole system made by chain stores and distribution centers by analyzing their relations and the cost-profit relations. It has also made full comparison between the internal and overseas researches. It gives the multi-objective stochastic integer-programming model of chain store location and distribution center's joint decision-making under the SCM environment. An example is given to illustrate the validity of the model.The whole paper is made up of five parts.