Dynamic Inventory Control And Supply Chain Coordination In Fresh Produce Wholesale Market

Wholesale market plays an important role in the fresh produce supply chain.It is in the center of the chain and its features influence the behaviors of participants.The seller(wholesaler)displays and sells products via the market,thus the factors such as the product’s attributes and the market’s features should be taken account into his decision.From the perspective of the product,its perishability is one of the hottest topics in academic researches.From the perspective of the market,factors such as the varying price,the asymmetric information,and the lack of cooperation make the participants’ decisions more complicated.The existed studies on perishable inventory and supply chain management usually start with idealized assumptions,which are lack of attention on the features of the fresh produce wholesale market.Also,the diverse research approaches on these topics are not in a systematic framework.Fresh produces have different lifetime,which leads to different management problems.The thesis first studies the products with relatively short lifetime and considers the display decision from the warehouse to the booth together with the inventory decisions.Under the framework of Markov decision process,the dynamics in the market as well as the product’s perishability are included in the model as a variant of inventory management problem.With this model,the optimal policy could be calculated under small scale problem.The heuristic policies are developed by observing the optimal policy and their performances are evaluated by simulation.For products with relatively long lifetime,the random market price influences the participants’ decisions.For a system with one wholesaler and one retailer,a bi-level Markov decision process model is used to study their interaction under the fluctuated market price and to describe the mechanism that the price influences the supply and demand.The asymmetric information of freshness as well as the feature of price is included and studied with the model.For the traditional wholesaler-retailer relationship in the wholesale market,these factors also have influence on them.To be specific,the wholesaler may delay the sales of products when facing to low market price,thus the freshness decreases and the profit of the supply chain is reduced.To study this mechanism,the freshness distribution in the market is estimated,and based on the estimation,a long-term contract is developed to rule the wholesaler’s behavior and promote the profit of the supply chain.Compared to the existing researches on perishable inventory and supply chain management,this thesis introduces the influence of the wholesale market’s features into the model and studies products with different lifetime in different approaches.The thesis also develops improving policies based on the numerical experiments and provides managerial suggestions for the practitioners.