We consider a production-inventory system where the production and demand follow Poisson processes whose rates are modulated by an external stochastic environment process. We study two such systems: with and without an external supplier, and show an interesting stochastic decomposition relationship between the steady state distribution of inventory levels in these two systems. We consider the o...

We address the coordination problem in a single-supplier/multiple-buyer supply chain. The supplier wishes to coordinate the supply chain by offering quantity discounts. To obtain their complete cost information, the supplier exchanges his own cost parameters with buyers leading to vertical information sharing. The supplier thinks that the buyers, as they have access to supplier’s setup and hold...

A supply chain consisting of a single-supplier and a single-buyer is modeled and compared in two different modes: non-coordinated and coordinated. The model is established based on the fact that the demand is uncertain and shortages are considered as lost sales. The buyer’s order lead time is a nonlinear function of the buyer’s order size and the number of shipments from the supplier. Quantity ...

Major changes in the cellular terminal business market environment have resulted in a situation where supply chains need to realign their approach to demand and supply planning, supply dynamics and to technology cooperation practices to stay competitive. The purpose of this research was address the problematic of a dynamic and volatile business environment in regards to supply chains by creatin...

Within a supply chain, purchasing plays a key role in achieving corporate competition. Hence, selecting the right suppliers is a vital component of these strategies. In practice, supplier selection is a multiobjective programming problem with vagueness and imprecision of the input data. In spite of the importance of the problem, the literature on this subject is relatively scarce. In this paper...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) currently uses a bidding system to determine carriers and suppliers that would partner in providing food aid annually in response to global emergencies and famine. We mimic the USDA approach via a robust optimization model featuring box and ellipsoid uncertainty frameworks to account for uncertainties in demand, supplier and carrier bid prices. Through ...

The under-performance of supply chains presents a significant hindrance to disease control in developing countries. Stock-outs of essential medicines lead to treatment interruption which can force changes in patient drug regimens, drive drug resistance and increase mortality. This study is one of few to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of supply chain policies in reducing shortages and...

This paper proposes an inverse lot-sizing model for eliciting the cost parameters (the setup, holding, and backlog costs) of a supplier from earlier demand vs. optimal lot-size pairs. It is assumed that the supplier solves a single-item, multi-period, uncapacitated lot-sizing problem with backlogs to optimality to calculate its lot-sizes, and the buyer is aware of this fact. The inverse optimiz...

Market is in many respects distinct from barter. This distinction needs to be emphasized, because the conventional theory treats market and barter erroneously as the same. Barter is essentially bilateral in nature. It requires the reciprocity of supply and demand. The supplier has to demand the good that the demander of his goods offers and vice versa. Further, when both—the supplier and the de...

This communication addresses the integration of the supplier capacity in the procurement planning process of a customer within a supply chain. Since this supply chain evolves within an uncertain environment, uncertainties may be due to an ill-known demand (prevision) and to the customer production system (scraps, imprecise processing time...). Thus, we propose a collaborative process where the ...