We consider a two-echelon supply chain: a single retailer holds a finished goods inventory to meet an i.i.d. customer demand, and a single manufacturer produces the retailer’s replenishment orders on a make-to-order basis. In this setting the retailer’s order decision has a direct impact on the manufacturer’s production. It is a well known phenomenon that inventory control policies at the retai...

Supply chain design attempts to deploy resources to synchronize product flow through multiple tiers of the network and eventually fulfill customers’ requirements (Lee, 2000). Traditionally, due to limited sales information and trade barriers, consumers chose local products. But nowadays consumers access the ever opening global market much easier with the help of the globalization. Though overal...

The agile production planning and control system (APPCS, for short) is a real time system that can respond to uncertainty immediately. In this paper, we provide a formulation of the APPCS by unified modeling language (UML). The APPCS model is described by a class diagram, in which classes and associations are plotted to show its semantics. In a case study, a simulation model is designed as an e...

The bullwhip effect is defined as the distortion of demand information as one moves upstream in the supply chain, causing severe inefficiencies in the whole supply chain. Although extensive research has been conducted to study the causes of the bullwhip effect and seek mitigation solutions with respect to several demand processes, less attention has been devoted to the ...

W study the following question: How does competition influence the inventory holdings of General Motors’ dealerships operating in isolated U.S. markets? We wish to disentangle two mechanisms by which local competition influences a dealer’s inventory: (1) the entry or exit of a competitor can change a retailer’s demand (a sales effect); and (2) the entry or exit of a competitor can change the am...

An optimization model is proposed to redesign the supply chain of spare part delivery under demand uncertainty in a specified planning horizon. Long term decisions involve new installations, expansions and elimination of warehouses handling multiple products. It is considered which warehouses should be used as repair work-shops to store, repair and deliver used units to customers. Tactical plan...

In this paper, we study a buyback contract model of the competitive newsvendor problem between a single supplier and multiple retailers under simultaneous price and safety stock competition. A price completion factor and a spill rate translate the price and safety stock competition, respectively. Our model is an extension of the problem analyzed in Zhao and Atkins (2) by the adoption of a buyba...

This paper examines an integrated decision-making process regarding pricing for uncertain demand and sourcing from uncertain supply, which are often studied separately in the literature. Our analysis of the integrated system suggests that the base stock list price policy fails to achieve optimality even under deterministic demand. Instead, the optimal policy is characterized by two critical val...

This paper considers the joint economic lot-sizing problem (JELP) for multi-layer supply chain with multi-retailers and single manufacturer and supplier. The paper extends the work of (Ben-Daya et al., 2013) and relaxes the assumption of deterministic demand and constant holding and ordering costs. The paper proposes modifying four computational intelligent algorithms to solve mixed integer pro...

This paper considers a multi-item inventory distribution problem motivated by a practical case occurring in the logistic operations of an hospital. There, a single warehouse supplies several nursing wards. The goal is to de ne a weekly distribution plan of medical products that minimizes the visits to wards, while respecting inventory capacities and safety stock levels. A mathematical formulati...