An Inventory Sharing Method For Three-echelon Distribution Networks Of Aviation Equipments Constraints Based On Lateral Transshipments

One of the most important reasons that the company host inventory is to satisfy service level require. And fill rate which means the ratio of the demand satisfied by inventory on hand is a classical index of serves level. In the actual operation, the company often improves serves level by inventory sharing, and lateral transshipments is one way of inventory sharing. Transshipments policy is widely applied to automobile, clothing, skin product and computer industry. When lead time is comparatively long and demand is difficult to predict, transshipments policy proves to be an effective coordination mechanisms to match demand and supply and a special risk-sharing approach.With respect to the research on lateral transshipments, the focus is mainly concentrated in two areas:the way to share inventory (complete pooling and partial pooling) and inventory control policy (periodic counting and cycle counting). By now, in the researches, the supply chain structure is mainly concentrated single or two stage network. However, in order to respond to demand quickly, the company often adopts multi-stage distribution network. This paper is dedicated to study the lateral transshipments of three-stage distribution network. The main context is described as follows:(1) The analysis of queuing model in inventory management:In the paper, inventory system is regarded as a special queuing system. In this system, the service supplied by the system is storage, and the customers are the products. Using queuing theory, the paper solve the ratios of demand that be satisfied by inventory on hand, lateral transshipments, direct delivering and the lost sales.(2) To build the partial pooling model of the three-echelon distribution networks based on lateral transshipments:the model works out the inventory control policy of the central and region warehouse, and the inventory sharing policy of the region warehouses. Of course, the paper also designs reasonable greedy algorithms to search the near-optimum solution.(3) Combine the actual operation of China Aviation Supplies Holding Company:the paper obtains the satisfactory solution using VisualC++6.0 programmer. In the end, the paper compares the solutions of (Q, R, H) policy and One-for-One policy to validate the advantage of the (Q, R, H) policy.The inventory sharing method studied by this paper is a complement to pre-existing literature. And the model is more useful to distribution centers, so it can provide valuable theoretical basis for decision-making to managers.