Collaboration In Assembly Systems Under Dual Supply Modes With Uncertainties

Taking full advantages of every participant’s high quality resources is one of thebiggest strengths of assembly systems. As such, assembly systems have been widelyapplied in automobile, electronics and many other industries. However, the unavoidablechallenge is how to ensure every participant move harmonized and synchronized.Meanwhile, in the development of supply chain management theory and practice, it isproved that the collaboration among the supply chain participants can achieve awonderful synchronized effect, which can significantly improve the competency of theentire chain. As such, this thesis focused on the collaboration in the widely appliedassembly systems under dual supply modes with different uncertainties.Firstly, through the interview with the practitioners and the literature review, theuncertainties lying in the real operations are summarized, such as the stochastic lead time,the random yield and demand. Besides, two different supply modes, the ordering modeand the VMI mode, are concluded from the practical operations of the assembly systems.Upon the above qualitative analysis, this thesis sets up two different models withstochastic lead time and random yield and demand, respectively. Then, the system’soptimal decisions are separately studied. After that, a centralized system is introduced asthe benchmark to find out the reasons that caused the inefficiency in decentralizedsystems, and some customized contracts are proposed to achieve the decentralizedsystems’ collaboration. Finally, the decentralized systems’ uncoordinated phenomenonand the corresponding reasons are shown via numerical examples, as well as theeffectiveness of the proposed contracts. Based on these, the related managerial insightsare drawn, which are valuable to the management practice.