This paper addresses the integrated production-inventory-distribution decisions in a three-echelon supply chain (SC) network. The studied SC network is composed of a raw material processor that supplies different types of processed raw materials to a set of manufacturing facilities which in turn deliver their end products to a set of retailers facing external demand from end customers. A mixed ...

Product perishability is a major concern of certain industrial sectors, especially the agro-food industry. This paper investigates the effect of product perishability and retailers’ stockout policy on system total cost, net profit, service level, and average inventory level in a two-echelon inventory–distribution system, and develops an approximate inventory model to these system performance me...

Previous researchers have developed ways of managing forward-oriented supply chains, and gave insight to solve single-stage inventory systems. In this study, we analyze an inventory system with traditional forward-oriented material flow as well as a reverse material flow supply chain. In the reverse material flow, the used products are returned, remanufactured and shipped to the retailer for re...

In this article we present an effective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for design of a multi-echelon stochastic inventory system with uncertain customer demands. In You and Grossmann [2010] a three-echelon supply chain with inventories under uncertainty is presented. In that supply chain, the location of the plants and the customer demand zones (CDZ) are known. Potential di...

In multi-echelon inventory systems the performance of a given node is affected by events that occur at many other nodes and in many other time periods. For example, a supply disruption upstream will have an effect on downstream, customer-facing nodes several periods later as the disruption "cascades" through the system. There is very little research on stock-out prediction in single-echelon sys...

We consider the classic N -stage serial supply systems with linear costs and stationary random demands. There are deterministic transportation leadtimes between stages, and unsatisfied demands are backlogged. The optimal inventory policy for this system is known to be an echelon base-stock policy, which can be computed through minimizing N nested convex functions recursively. To identify the ke...