Supplier Selection Strategies For Fresh Product

We study the supplier selection problem in which a distributor purchases a fresh product from multiple suppliers and then sell them at the local fresh product market that with a fixed trading time window.Compared with other ordinary products, the most significant feature of fresh product is they are easily deteriorated. Statistical data shows that the fresh products’ deterioration during transportation is huge. Besides the corruption, as a result of the influence by weather, crops’growth period or livestock’s ill, etc., each fresh product supplier may be yield unreliable, which means the supplied quantity could not obtain the ordered quantity by the distributor. Referring to the relevant literature, we assume that the supply quantity each supplier supplies is the minimum of the distributor’s ordering quantity and the related supplier’s production capacity. Besides the yield uncertainty, the distributor must cope with another uncertainty:the market demand, and we use general distribution denoting it.Because of the existence of the trading time window, the reach time of the fresh products affects fresh item’s sales and inventory status:if the arrival time is earlier than the beginning of the trading time window, then the distributor must stock the fresh product and waits for the open of the business, but a additional holding cost is paid; if the arrival time is later than the close of trading time window, the distributor need to dispose the fresh product with a surplus value.According to the principal that profit is the difference of the total income and total costs, we formulate the distributor’s expected profit function. Then we apply the KKT condition to acquire the properties of the distributor’s optimal solutions. Next, we get some indications of distributor’s supplier selection strategies by comparing therein two of random suppliers:it is the adjusted unit total cost which involves the consideration of deterioration and transport delay that plays the most important role in the selection of suppliers; then the reliability comes to the second place; two not perfectly reliable suppliers with the same adjusted unit total cost the same competitive power in terms of whether being selected by the distributor. Besides, we consider the case there are only total two suppliers and give the indications of how they strength their competitive power respectively.Next, the algorithm of ensuring the optimal ordered quantities and the numerical experiment are given. Finally, we summarize our study, and give the directions of future research.