My dissertation addresses a number of challenges in perishable inventory management in supply chains, providing both theoretical results and managerial insights. Essay 1: In this essay, we review the literature on supply chain management of perishable products that have a fixed or random lifetime, primarily focusing on challenges introduced by aging of such products. We start with a review of t...

This paper studies a perishable inventory model, which assumes that each perishable item has finite lifetime, and only one item is consumed each time. The lifetimes of perishable items are independent random variables with the general distribution and so are the consumption internal. Under this assumption, by using backward equations and limit distribution of Markov skeleton processes, this pap...

it is assumed in most of the existing models that the items can be stored for an unlimited time to meet the future’s demand and their quality and quantity does not change during that period. nevertheless there are special kinds of products which deteriorate or become unusable (such as food products, alcohol, medicines, etc.). therefore if the rate of deterioration is significantly high, the imp...

In any supply chain, distribution planning of products is of great importance to managers. With effective and flexible distribution planning, mangers can increase the efficiency of time, place, and delivery utility of whole supply chain. In this paper, inventory routing problem (IRP) is applied to distribution planning of perishable products in a supply chain. The studied supply chain is compos...

Recently, market globalization and competition have forced companies to find alternative means to boost sales and revenue. The use of the cash flow is increasingly becoming a viable alternative for managers to improve their company’s profitability in a supply chain. In today’s business transactions, a supplier usually asks a manufacturer to pay via the advance-cash-credit (ACC) payment scheme i...

Consider a multi-channel supply chain (hereafter SC) system, producing and distributing two substitutable products. Within this framework, we study the SC efficiency by comparing several decentralized SC configurations with a centralized one. Our result show that it is often possible to achieve 93.5% or more of the total profit of a centralized SC in a decentralized configuration, which suggest...

This paper develops a two-stage model to consider a franchise/franchisee environment in which supply chains are simultaneously entering the untapped market to produce either identical or highly substitutable products and give franchise to franchisees. Customer demand is elastic, price dependent and customer utility function is based on Huff gravity rule model. The supply chains, in the first st...