Optimizing production and inventory decisions in a multistage supply chain

Abstract

The area of supply chain management (SCM) has recently gained the interest of researchers as well as practitioners in the industrial sector. It is not any more the case that firms can work and optimize their inventory systems in isolation of their suppliers and customers. Supply chain management calls for elevating the level of understanding and cooperation among the supply chain members as this would reduce the cost and improve service levels. A well known class of problems in the SCM area is the joint economic lot-sizing problem (JELS) in which we try to minimize the joint total cost for the whole supply chain instead of independently optimizing every party's cost. This thesis deals with the JELS in the context of a three-layer supply chain consisting of a single supplier, a single manufacturer and multi retailers. The objective is to determine the optimal production and shipping schedule that minimizes the chain-wide total cost. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)