Supplier Selection in Three Echelon Supply Chain & Vendor Managed Inventory Model Under Price Dependent Demand Condition

This paper, considers the supplier selection in three echelon supply chain with Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) strategy under price dependent demand condition. As there is a lack of study on the supplier selection in VMI literature, this paper presents a VMI model in supply chain including multi supplier, one distributer and multi retailer that distributer selects suppliers. Two class models (traditional vs. VMI) are presented and we compare them to study the impact of VMI on supply chain and supplier selection. As the proposed model is a NP-hard problem, a meta-heuristics namely Harmony Search is employed to optimize the proposed models. We show that how the VMI system can effect on supplier selection and can change the set of selected suppliers. Finally the conclusion and further studies are presented