Research On Multi-period Order Allocation Based On Uncertain Environment

In today's fierce competitive environment, characterized by thin profit margins, high consumer expectations for quality products and short lead-times, companies are forced to take advantage of any opportunity to optimize their business processes. To reach this aim, academics and practitioners have come to the same conclusion:for a company to remain competitive, it has to work with its supply chain partners to improve the chain's total performance. Thus, being the main process in the upstream chain and affecting all areas of an organization, the purchasing function is taking an increasing importance. As the start part of the purchasing function, the supplier selection is critical for the result. And it is the main research field in recent years.Today, the market is so uncertainty because of the vary of the price and demand that companies tend to retain a long-term and close relationship with their suppliers and purchase in multi-period from some certain suppliers in order to avoid the risk. However, few of the existing models consider this kind of dynamic environment.This paper takes the supplier selection and purchasing quantity allocation in the uncertain environment as the research objects. The paper finishes the work in the following four aspects:(1)A paper research background is introduced, and then a review on the related literature of supplier selection and purchasing quantity allocation problem is conducted. Finally, the contents of the paper research are generalized and combined into to a concrete research frame.(2)Basic concept and related theories of uncertain programming including multi-objective programming, stochastic chances constrain programming and fuzzy theory are introduced.(3)Multi-period optimization model for order allocation based on stochastic demand is formulated. The solving method is also proposed. The research is done on the model of supplier selection and purchasing quantity allocation problem. According to the nature of objective, two models are formulated:multi-objective mixed integer programming model based on chance-constraints and fuzzy multi-objective mixed integer programming model. And goal programming and fuzzy goal programming are proposed to solve the model.(4)The example analysis is conducted on the purchasing quantity allocation problem. The model and approach is proved easy and applicable to resolve supplier selection and its purchasing quantity allocation problem by a numerical example.In addition, the main findings and conclusions, major contribution and limitations and requiring work for further research are summarized at the end of the paper.