1. Introduction In recent years, supply chain technologies and processes (vendor managed inventory (VMI), continuous replenishment (CR), electronic data interchange (EDI), etc.) have become strategic imperatives for firms in increasingly competitive industries (Williams and Frolick 2001). Extensive research has examined the performance outcomes from these supply chain initiatives. For example, ...

In a VMI service, a central production center (i.e. the vendor) can control the inventory of each retailer according to the optimization of the costs due both to the overfilling/stock-out of the inventories and to the travels required for the deliveries. In this work, an original mathematical programming approach has been formulated and implemented in order to show that under specific but commo...

In this research, we deal with VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) problem where one supplier is responsible for managing a retailer’s inventory under unstable customer demand situation. To cope with the nonstationary demand situation, we develop a retrospective action-reward learning model, a kind of reinforcement learning techniques, which is faster in learning than conventional action-reward lear...

In this paper, we study a logistics network design problem with vendor managed inventory in which the company is in charge of managing inventory for its downstream warehouses and retailers, and can choose whether to satisfy each retailer’s demand. The problem incorporates the location, transportation, pricing, and warehouse-retailer echelon inventory replenishment decisions. Traditionally, thes...

The bullwhip effect means that demand variability increases as one moves up the supply chain. In the following article the bullwhip effect is quantified for each part of the supply chain which is presupposed to consist of a producer, a wholesaler, a retailer, and a consumer. After considering the causes of the bullwhip effect, it will be shown with the help of a nonlinear optimization model to ...

T work is motivated by the need to solve the inventory routing problem when implementing a business practice called vendor managed inventory replenishment. With vendor managed inventory replenishment, vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished at each customer. The inventory routing problem attempts to coordinate inventory replenis...