Research On Inventory Routing Problem Based On VMI Environment

Recently, the role of supply chain management is emphasized than ever before. The object of supply chain management is to optimize cost, profit, risk standard and to satisfy the changing and variable need of the customers. VMI (Vendor Management Inventory) is an advanced inventory management method. The problem might occur in VMI is the inventory routing problem. This paper emphasize on inventory routing problem under broad sense supplier and provider environment.This paper analyzed supply chain management, VMI theory at first, and then outline and analyze the reseller's advantages judging from the content of the agreement between reseller and supplier. After analyzing the trade-off between inventory and routing, this paper analyzed the inventory-routing cooperation game process, and gave subgame perfect nash equilibria ,finally explained the inventory's superiority in the process.After analyzed the inventory's superiority in VMI environment, this paper did research on the VMI operation process and gave its workflow pattern. In consequence, this paper used an example which contains one supplier and more than one resellers to give a cooperated optimization method to change inventory routing problem into a vehicle routing problem. Finally, this paper adapted an improved inventory control model which contains following features:①max-min inventory control model to decrease safety inventory and inventory cost;②set up vehicle complexity factor to describe the complexity when loading multi-type products;③adapted two-session enlightenment algorithm to plan for shipping.