Research On Inventory-Distribution Integrated Optimization Of The New Retail Omni-Channel Supply Chain With Stochastic Demand

With the development of Internet technologies such as big data and the upgrading of consumer demand,the New Retail model featuring online-offline channel integration,inventory sharing,inventory pre-positioning and fast delivery came into being.However,the promotion and development of New Retail model is constrained by the high operating costs associated with premium services.How to optimize the supply chain to reduce operating costs is the main challenge for the development of New Retail-oriented enterprises.Due to the trade-off between the inventory cost and the distribution cost in New Retail's omni-channel supply chain,the inventory cost will increase as a result of the lose of centralized replenishment's scale benefits when only the inventory cost is optimized and stores' inventory quantity is reduced,whereas the distribution cost will increase with the excessive store inventory when only the distribution cost is optimized.It can be seen that optimizing only one of the two cannot reduce the overall operating costs of the supply chain.Therefore,how to allocate the optimal inventory to stores to balance inventory cost and distribution cost and to reduce the overall operating costs of the supply chain is a crucial problem that the new retailers need to solve.This paper studied the inventory-distribution integrated optimization of omni-channel supply chain in the New Retail scenario.Firstly,this paper analysed the system structure,operation mode and characteristics of the New Retail omni-channel supply chain,and then summarized the influencing factors and related costs of the integrated optimization problem.Secondly,the mathematical model of inventory-distribution integrated optimization was built based on Markov Process.The objective function was the sum of the total inventory and distribution costs of the New Retail omni-channel supply chain.Thirdly,on the basis of the model building,this paper studied the case of company A and worked out the solutions of optimization model based on the collected data through Matlab and genetic algorithm:the optimal inventory allocation of each store with minimal total system costs.Finally,some sensitivity analysis was carried out to further explore the impact of demand structure and demand penalty costs on the inventory-distribution integrated optimization solutions of the New Retail supply chain,which would contribute to New Retail companies' coping strategies in terms of supply chain optimization and cost control to adapt to the environmental changes.