Research On VMI Integrated Delivery-Replenishment Policy With Loading Capacity Limit

VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory, referred to VMI for short), is a kind of integrated inventory management mode based on supply chain management innovation. Under VMI circumstance the supplier takes the Integrated Delivery-Replenishment Policy, wait until the demands from downstream accumulated to a certain level then delivery once, and at the same time coordinate the replenishment policy, this operation can obtain the scale economic benefits and save the transportation cost and total inventory management cost. Base on the modern information technology, VMI changes the Cost structure that base on traditional inventory management mode. The proportion of transportation cost of the total cost of inventory management increase significantly, and transport loading capacity limitation became an important part of the influence factors of actual transportation cost. In order to take full advantage of VMI of reducing inventory management cost, this paper studies the influence of transport loading capacity limitation on inventory management cost.At first analyses the operation processes between supplier and its customers, and the cost during the processes, qualitative analyses the inventory management cost structure of VMI, propose improving the delivery cost to reflect the influence of transport loading capacity limitation on inventory management cost.Considering transport loading capacity limitation proposes VMI Integrated Delivery-Replenishment Policy, establishes VMI single-point Integrated Delivery-Replenishment model with loading capacity limit. This model presumes that the demand of downstream customers can be integrated into a Poisson-flow demand; take minimization of total cost of inventory management which constituted of delivery, replenishment, inventory-hold costs of supplier and the waiting costs of the downstream customers as the optimization objective; Using the improved-delivery-cost parameters to reflect the influence of loading capacity constraints on integrated delivery replenishment model. Base on the original integration delivery-replenishment policy, respectively solves the single-point time-based and quantity-based dispatching policy, and takes the numerical analysis.Considering the customers'demand characteristics which vary with different customers and different time, taking the total cost of inventory management which constituted of inventory-hold cost and shortage costs at the customers and the delivery cost as the optimization objective, establishes the VMI multi-point Integrated Delivery-Replenishment model with loading capacity limit, and propose an improved genetic algorithm.