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...

In many production=distribution systems, materials !ow from one stage to another in %xed lot sizes. For example, a retailer orders a full truckload from a manufacturer to qualify for a quantity discount; a factory has a material handling system that moves full containers of parts from one production stage to the next. In this paper, we derive optimal policies for multi-stage serial and assembly...

In supply chain networks, the flow of material occurs between various business entities such as suppliers, manufactures, distributors and retailers, which can be considered as the various echelons (levels) in a multi-echelon supply chain network. Spare parts supply chain management deals with optimizing stocking, purchasing, repairing and disposing activities of purchased parts and their compon...

We provide a broad characterization of the supply chain settings in which perfect coordination can be achieved with a simple wholesale pricing scheme based on constant unit wholesale prices or a single quantity discount scheme. We confine ourselves to two-echelon chains with a single supplier servicing a network of retailers who compete with each other by selecting retail prices (Bertrand compe...

We derive approximations for the service levels of two-echelon inventory systems with lost sales and Poisson demand. Our method is simple and accurate for a very broad range of problem instances, including cases with both high and low service levels. In contrast, existing methods only perform well for limited problem settings, or under restrictive assumptions.

This paper focuses on the development of simulation-based environment for multi-echelon cyclic planning and optimisation in the product maturity phase. It is based on integration of analytical and simulation techniques. Analytical techniques are used to obtain initial planning decisions under conditions of stochastic demand and lead time, whereas simulation techniques extend these conditions to...

This paper deals with divergent logistic networks where the inventory at each node is controlled using a periodic review strategy with order-up-to level. An approximate method is presented to analyse the network performance (service levels, mean physical stock). The method is tested on a range of Z-echelon and 3-echelon networks by comparison to results from Monte Carlo simulation. We conclude ...