Freight transportation constitutes one of the main activities that influences economy and society, as it assures a vital link between suppliers and customers and is represents a major source of employment. Multi-echelon distribution is one of the most common strategies adopted by the transportation companies in an aim of cots reduction. Although vehicle routing problems are very common in opera...

Multi-echelon distribution systems are quite common in supply-chain and logistic systems. They are used by public administrations in their transportation and traffic planning strategies as well as by companies to model their distribution systems. In the literature, most of the studies address issues related to the movement of flows throughout the system from their origins to their final destina...

We address the optimal design of a multi-echelon supply chain and the associated inventory systems in the presence of uncertain customer demands. By using the guaranteed service approach to model the multi-echelon stochastic inventory system, we develop an optimization model for simultaneously optimizing the transportation, inventory and network structure of a multi-echelon supply chain. We for...

Starting in the 1960s, a number of academic works have focused in serial and distributed multi-echelon structures and in both deterministic and stochastic environments. Clark and Scarf (1960, 1962) developed a seminal work in which they presented optimal policies for a serial multi-echelon system. Schwartz (1973) studied a deterministic model having one warehouse and N retailers and showed that...

The efficient and timely distribution of freight goods is critical for supporting the demands of modern urban areas. Optimum freight ensures the survival and development of urban areas. In the contemporary logistic there are two main distribution strategies: direct distribution and multi-echelon distribution. In the direct distribution, means of transport, starting from the main distribution ce...

In today’s dynamic market numerous dynamic influencing factors have seriously aggravates the difficulties of inventory planning of the complex distribution networks. This paper proposes a simulation-based hybrid approach for the optimization of the inventory policies in complex distribution networks. The initial multi-echelon inventory policies are handed over to a simulation model, which is ca...

Since Clark and Scarf’s pioneering work, most advances in multi-echelon inventory systems have been based on demand processes that are time-independent. This paper revisits the serial multi-echelon inventory system of Clark and Scarf, and develops three key results. First, we provide a simple lower bound approximation to the optimal echelon inventory levels and an upper bound to the total syste...

Multi-echelon transaction is a common situation in the supply chain nowadays. This research is to formulate a three-echelon integrated inventory model under defective products, reworking and credit period consideration. An algorithm and numerical analysis are used to observe the effect of defective rate and credit period time to the inventory policy and total profit.

inventory control is one of the most important issues in supply chain management. in this paper, a three-echelon production, distribution, inventory system composed of one producer, a set of wholesalers and retailers is considered. costumers' demands can be approximated by a normal distribution and the inventory policy is a kind of continuous review (r, q). in this paper, a model based on ...

An arborescent distribution system is a multi-level system in which each installation receives input from a unique immediate predecessor and supplies one or more immediate successors. In this paper, it is shown that a distribution system with an arborescent structure can also be modelled using an echelon stock concept where at any instant the total echelon holding cost is accumulated at the sam...