Analytical Target Cascading Based Optimal Configuration Of Dual-channel Multi-echelon Distribution Network Considering Inventory Transshipment

With the rapid development of the electronic commerce and logistics industry,in order to expand sales areas,more and more enterprises begin to carry out the strategy of dual channel by incorporating online channel into its original distribution system.However,the regularity with which the online order occurs is difficult to predict,the offline sales quantities of the product currently being sold are often subject to the dynamic impact of the new product and then shows greatly uncertainty.As a result,the excess or shortage of online and offline inventory frequently happens.So we need to get through the online and offline inventory to reduce the total inventory quantities via the hedging of demand fluctuation.The inventory transshipment is a strategy for inventory sharing between the members,widely used in the enterprise.The inventory transshipment is a common strategy for inventory sharing between the members,widely used in the enterprise.It matches the supply and demand by transshipping excess stock of one channel to the other,and then achieves sharing risk,material redistribution,reducing shortage loss and improving the rationality of resource configuration in the supply chain.However,faced to the multiechelon distribution network,the overall coordination configuration of online and offline inventory of multiple retailers is highly complex.In view of the above problems,this paper combines the characteristics of dual channel distribution enterprises and analyzes the structure of the supply chain system under the dual channel sales.We seek the most appropriate inventory management strategy and solution method with the objective of the optimal operating cost and service time.How to consider the inventory transshipment in the process of multi period inventory configuration for each distribution node and how to coordinate the hierarchical distribution structure to make rapid and convergent cooperative decision are the core issue of the research.Thus,ensuring the best inventory cost and service time,we should reduce the possibility of future shortage as far as possible simultaneously.First,the structure of a dual channel multi-level distribution network,composed of group level,central warehouse level,distributor level and retailer level,is set up,and then the operation mode is analyzed in detail.Aimed at the risk of shortage that may arise from stochastic online and offline customer demand,the paper proposes two kinds of inventory transshipment mechanism,namely the single-node inventory transshipment and the samelevel inventory transshipment.Then,considering the unavoidable involvement of heterogeneous participants with autonomous decision power in the network as well as the dynamically changed transshipment and configuration in the network,a newly emerged multi-disciplinary optimization(MDO)method named Analytical Target Cascading(ATC)is adopted to solve the dual-channel multi-echelon distribution optimal inventory configuration model with local independent optimal decision and globally unified objective coordination.An example of dual-channel supply chain is adopted to demonstrate the proposed approach and managerial implications are obtained.