Study On The Determination Of Optimal Inventory Level In Dual-channel Supply Chain

With the rapid development of information technology, the electronic commerce based on Internet get more and more attention, and plenty of enterprises open up a network direct sales channel on the basis of traditional retail channel, using dual-channel supply chain to distribute their products. In the dual-channel supply chain environment, when a channel is out of stock, customers may choose the other channel to buy products, which increases the instability of the customer demand and makes enterprise inventory control risk increase. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the manufacturer and the retailer’s optimal inventory level under the environment of the dual-channel supply chain.According to the characteristics of dual-channel supply chain, base on queuing theory and Markoff chain related theories, first of all, we build a dual-channel supply chain queuing system model. According to the equilibrium state probability of the queuing system, we can obtain the quantity indexes about average inventory levels and stock-out probabilities of the manufacturer and the retailer, provide the basis for the establishment of dual-channel supply chain optimal inventory level model; secondly, the optimal inventory level model of the dual-channel supply chain is established. According to the quantity indexes from the dual-channel supply chain queuing system model, we study the dual-channel supply chain inventory cost, present the inventory cost formulas, and determine the optimal inventory levels of the manufacture and the retailer by minimizing the total cost, which provides a method for determining the optimal inventory level of dual-channel supply chain.Finally, we take Hebei Yutong Machinery Manufacturing company as an example, and validate the method through the MATLAB numerical simulation. We can obtain respectively the manufacturer and the retailer’s optimal inventory level in decentralized inventory control model and centralized inventory control model, and we can find that the inventory strategy under centralized inventory control model is better than the decentralized inventory control model by contrasting. This research not only can reduce the cost and improve the operation efficiency of the dual-channel supply chain effectively, but also can provide reference for the inventory strategy study of dual-channel supply chain.