Coordinated Inventory Model for the Joint Replenishment Supply Chain

We consider an integrated supply chain model in which multiple suppliers replenish items for a single buyer’s demand. Also the buyer specifies a basic replenishment cycle and the suppliers replenish the items only at those time intervals. Namely, we propose a model to study and analyze the benefit by coordinating supply chain inventories through the basic replenishment cycle time. The objective of this model is to minimize the total relevant annual cost of the integrated inventory model. After developing proposed coordinated models, we suggest heuristics for searching the solutions of our models. Finally, numerical and computational experiments for each policy are carried out to evaluate the benefits of those models and the compensation policy is addressed to share the benefits.