The Research On How To Integrate The Location And Delivery Of Logistic Centers Of Suppliers

As the economical globalization and market competition increase, enterprises have shifted their focus to logistics,"the third profit source"and considered the improvement of logistic management the breakthrough of obtaining competitive advantage. Only a scientific and proper logistic network can guarantee highly efficient logistic operation, therefore, it becomes increasingly important to construct a good supplier's logistic network.The construction of a supplier's logistic network mainly consists of the location of a logistic center and the arrangement of the distribution route. This paper, overcoming the shortcomings of previous researches on a single stage logistic network, the identification of retailer's demand and goods transportation of a single variety, takes into consideration the problems of location-distribution and vehicle route combined and proposes the network model integrating supplier's selection of logistic centers based on random customer demand with distribution. It also gives consideration to the actual operation in which the sales volume of retailers conforms to some normal distribution and the retailers have to provide delivery of several products instead of a single product.In view of the above problems this paper does its research with two theories. First, it establishes a bi-level programming model .The upper-level program is about how to minimize the cost of locating a best logistic system by the decision-making department while the lower-level program concerns about the identification of transportation route to minimize the distribution fees. Second, this paper provides solution to the bi-level programming integrating the location of a supplier's logistic center and distribution through single genetic algorithms and loop optimization. The procedures are as follow: first work out the lower-level program and substitute the satisfying result into the upper-level program. A program which is better than the initial program can be attained through this procedure and the location of supplier's logistic center and distribution route can be decided by resolving this model.Finally, this paper makes conclusions through case analysis. The conclusions are: if suppliers want to get the minimum cost of location and distribution combined they have to consider location and distribution in combination instead of minimizing the location cost and the distribution cost separately.