INVESTIGATING THE MULTI-STAGE SUPPLY CHAIN PRODUCTION AND INVENTORY COORDINATIONFOR MODELS WITH DIFFERENT MECHANISMS AND A BENEFIT SHARING SCHEME
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In recent years, with the advancement in electronic commerce capabilities the supply chain production and inventory coordination received a lot of attention. However, many developed models deal with two-stage chains and when multi-stage supply chains are considered, these models are based on restrictive assumptions. Therefore, there is a need to analyze models that relax the usual assumptions to allow for a more realistic analysis of the supply chain. This research aims at answering questions about how supply chain decisions can be coordinated and optimized to maintain low costs and accepted service levels. To achieve this, mathematical optimization models will be developed to integrate production-inventory decisions across the entire supply chain. These models will be formulated to represent multi-stage, non-serial supply chains, with three different mechanisms namely the equal cycle mechanism, the integer multipliers mechanism and powers of two multipliers mechanism. Then cost minimization procedures will be proposed in order to obtain feasible and satisfactory solutions to the problem. A benefits sharing scheme will also be suggested to motivate cooperation among the supply chain partners. The findings will be in form of numerical results which will indicated the best mechanism in terms of total cost and proper coordination benefit sharing scheme.
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