Research On Inventory And Distribution Coordination In Decentralized Supply Chain

The research content of this paper comes from the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 70771034).Since 1990s, with the globalization of market economy, supply chain management becomes a new enterprise-operating philosophy. Lately, strategic outsourcing in manufacturing, logistics and other business indicates the trend of supply chain management. This has caused supply chain with many enterprises whose economics benefits were connected with each other and whose business relationships were close to each other. However, there are many problems coming up during supply chain management. One core problem among them is how to coordinate supply chain operations effectively, especially coordination problems in decentralized supply chain. Therefore, research on supply chain coordination is helpful to enterprises in supply chain to make scientific decisions so that the supply chain could achieve the overall optimization.Lately, there are two main researches on supply chain coordination: the first one is how to coordinate and control inventory relevant cost of each node in supply chain to minimize the overall inventory relevant cost; the second one is the traditional Vehicle Routing Problem. There are few researches on supply chain coordination considering both inventory and distribution simultaneously. So this paper studies coordination strategies based on one-to-many two-echelon supply chain, considering both inventory and distribution simultaneously. The details are as follows:(1)This paper studies coordination strategies in a decentralized stochastic demanded supply chain considering both inventory and distribution. Profit models of vendor in the one-supplier-N-retailer supply chain system are proposed when a return policy was adopted and when it was not respectively. From vendor's angle, we analyzed when the supplier should adopt a return policy and then calculated an optimal return price. A genetic algorithm was designed to get a delivery routing to minimize the transportation cost. A numeric example indicates: whether to adopt a return policy relies on the salvage of unsold goods of the vendor and the wholesale price that supplier determines; when the wholesale price is made acceptable for retailers, the higher the price is, the more the vendor earns. (2) An improved algorithm was presented for the buyback model considering both the vendor's inventory relevant cost and transportation cost simultaneously, so that the profit of vendor could much more approach the optimal solution theoretically. The improved algorithm is nested with improved genetic algorithm and dichotomy, and four theorems are given to support the improved algorithm. The results of digital experiment indicate the improved algorithm could effectively reduce expectation cost of the vendor, thus increase expectation profit of the vendor.The research results presented above not only enrich the content of SCM, but also provide reference for decision makers in supply chain.