Research On Inventory-Transportation Integrated Optimization For VMI Systems

As an advanced method on inventory management, Vendor-Managed Inventory has been adopted broadly in reality. In VMI systems, vendor can choose different transportation policies more actively and freely to minimize the total costs and also to improve the standard of service simultaneously.The dissertation analyzes Inventory-Transportation Integrated Optimization problem for VMI, and two inventory-transportation integrated optimal models for immediate delivery policy and time-based consolidated delivery policy are built to compute the best ordering quantity (or best consolidated delivery cycle), as well as to minimize long-run average cost of vendors in VMI. Renewal theories of Stochastic Process are applied to analyze the models. The solutions are also discussed by Restrain Extreme-Value Theory in Non-Linear Programming of Operation Research.As example and cost comparisons show, long-run average cost for vendors under a time-based consolidated delivery policy is lower than an immediate delivery policy in common situation; retailers demand rate and vendor delivery cost influence on the long-run average cost for vendor under an immediate delivery more than a time-based consolidated delivery policy; and vendor should adopt the time-based consolidated delivery policy commonly, especially adopt the immediate delivery policy when the retailers demand rate is much low.