Dual-channel Retailer’s Distributed Inventory Control

With the competition and integration of online and offline sales channels, China’s retail industry has emerged a number of emerging dual-channel retailers. For the scale increases year by year and a wide range of products, multi-location inventory system is becoming more and more necessary in order to meet personalized and diverse customer demand. But the structure of dual-channel retailer inventory system is complex and the inventory control mode selection is difficult. So this paper puts forward the basis for the choice of the online-offline jointed inventory model.In this paper, according to the domestic and foreign research about the retailer’s inventory control and distributed inventory control and the theory of the dual-channel retailer, distributed inventory system and inventory control, combined with the summary of the domestic dual channel retailer inventory status, through the relationship between the order point and the inventory of the beginning period, it built the dual-channel retailer distributed inventory ordering and allocation model to minimize the total cost. And based on the summary of the genetic algorithm’s applicability of distributed inventory, with simulated annealing algorithm introduced to optimize, it gets the simulated annealing and genetic algorithms that is used to solve the distributed inventory model. Finally through comparing the reorder point, order quantity and allocation quantity and total cost between online-offline jointed inventory model and online-offline decentralized inventory model of dual-channel retailer distributed inventory system, we validate that the centralized control mode is the effective strategy for dual-channel retailer’s online-offline jointed inventory model.This research has great application value, with the study on the dual-channel retailer’s inventory control management further, it will produce more inventory control management mode and increase the general inventory cost optimization control factors, and these problems remains to be further.