The Study On Multi-echelon Inventory Control Model In Steaming Coal Supply Chain

As an indispensable basic energy, coal resource plays a crucial role in ensuring nationaleconomic stability. The fast growing pace of China’s economy and acceleration ofindustrialisation, have driven the increase of coal need, thereby steaming coal consumptiontakes the first positon. The area of China’s steaming coal production and consumption showsreverse distribution, which results a complete steaming coal supply process passes throughhighways, railways, waterways and other transportations to realize. Steaming coal supply chainshows a distributed multi-echelon system consisting nodes from different industries. Each nodeenterprise tends to set higher inventory level to cope with from the risks and losses comingfrom the uncertainties in supplyment, demands and supply chain connection. However, highlogistic costs and inventory level lead to rising prices of steaming coal in the circulation process.Inventory costs almost possess over60%of sales price. How to maintain the inventory level inthe whole steaming coal supply chain, with decreasing inventory costs and guaranteeing acontinuous and stable operation of steaming coal supply chain, has become a major problem ofsteaming coal supply chain management.Traditional steaming coal inventory control stragety was conducted from a singleenterprise internal angle to control the inventory, lacking of system and cooperation ideas. It’shard to share information between enterprises. Each link often adjusted their relationshipthrough a lot of buffer stocks, with impossibility of decreasing total inventory costs in steamingcoal supply chain. Therefore, this paper introduced multi-echelon inventory control theory intosteaming coal supply chain, built a distributed multi-echelon structural model of regionaldistribution centers and storage and distribution bases-centered in steaming coal supply chain,guided by market supply and demand for steaming coal order control. Using the global andsystematic guiding ideologies, and then put forward distributed multi-echelon inventory controlstrategy in steaming coal supply chain based on information coordinating center. Distributedinventory system in steaming coal supply chain formed a virtual concentrated inventory systemthrough the unified scheduling of information coordinating center. On this basis, this paper established a mathematical model, which was a distributed two echelon inventory controlmodel in steaming coal supply chain based on information coordinating center. The model wasdivided into ordering model and allocating model acoording to the relationship between thetotal reorder point and the total inventory level, taking total inventory costs minimum in acertain customer service level as the goal, genetic algorithm was presented to solve the optimalreorder points, order batches and allocating batches of regional distribution centers and storageand distribution bases. Finally, calculated the concrete example by distributed two echeloninventory control strategy in steaming supply chain based on information coordinating centerand traditional steaming coal inventory control strategy separately.The comparing resultsdemonstrated the feasibility of the distributed multi-echelon inventory control strategy insteaming coal supply chain based on information coordinating center. These results alsoindicated the effectiveness of the distributed two echelon inventory model and algorithm insteaming coal supply chain based on information coordinating center.This research provided new methods and ideas for solving the inventory control problemfor China’s steaming coal supply chain, resulting in a high popularisation and application value.