C often face nonstationary demand due to product life cycles and seasonality, and nonstationary demand complicates supply chain managers’ inventory decisions. This paper proposes a simple heuristic for determining stocking levels in a serial inventory system. Unlike the exact optimization algorithm, the heuristic generates a near-optimal solution by solving a series of independent single-stage ...

The paper analyses non-cooperative behaviour in a two-echelon decentralized supply chain, composed of one supplier and n retailers. For sufficient supply from the supplier, we build the approximate decision model of their base stock level, in which the suppliers reactions are not considered, and its non-cooperative behaviour is obtained. For insufficient supply from the supplier, much more comp...

This paper aims to investigate the integrated production/distribution and inventory planning for perishable products with fixed life time in the constant condition of storage throughout a two-echelon supply chain by integrating producers and distributors. This problem arises from real environment in which multi-plant with multi-function lines produce multi-perishable products with fixed life ti...

A multi-product, multi-stage, and multi-period scheduling model is proposed in this paper to deal with multiple incommensurable goals for a multi-echelon supply chain network with uncertain market demands and product prices. The uncertain market demands are modeled as a number of discrete scenarios with known probabilities, and the fuzzy sets are used for describing the sellers’ and buyers’ inc...

We consider a single-echelon, single-item inventory system where both demand and lead-time are stochastic. Continuous review policy is used to control the inventory system. The objective is to calculate the reorder point level under stochastic parameters. A case study is presented in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Keywords—Inventory control system, reorder point level, stochastic demand, stochas...

In this paper, we study a multi-echelon uncapacitated lot-sizing problem in series (mULS), where the output of the intermediate echelons has its own external demand, and is also an input to the next echelon. We propose a polynomial-time dynamic programming algorithm, which gives a tight, compact extended formulation for the two echelon case (2-ULS). Next, we present a family of valid inequaliti...

this study aims to minimize the total cost of a four-echelon supply chain including suppliers, an assembler, distributers, and retailers. the total cost consists of purchasing raw materials from the suppliers by the assembler, assembling the final product, materials transportation from the suppliers to the assembler, product transportation from the assembler to the distributors, product transpo...