Effective Zero-Inventory-Ordering Policies for the Single-Warehouse Multiretailer Problem with Piecewise Linear Cost Structures
Effective Zero-Inventory-Ordering Policies for the Single-Warehouse Multiretailer Problem with Piecewise Linear Cost Structures
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DOI：
10.1287/mnsc.48.11.1446.267
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发表时间：
2002-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
L. A. Chan;A. Muriel;Z. Shen;D. Simchi-Levi;C. Teo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. A. Chan;A. Muriel;Z. Shen;D. Simchi-Levi;C. Teo
我们分析了依赖 TL（整车）和 LTL（零担）承运商在整个供应链中配送产品的公司所面临的问题。我们的目标是设计简单的库存策略和运输策略，以满足有限范围内随时间变化的需求，同时通过利用运输成本结构中的数量折扣来最小化系统范围的成本。为此，我们研究了在仓库作为跨码头设施的单仓库多零售商场景中将库存策略限制为零库存订购 (ZIO) 策略的成本效益。特别是，我们证明存在 ZIO 库存策略，其总库存和运输成本不超过最优成本的 4/3（如果运输成本固定则为 5.6/4.6）倍。然而，找到最佳的 ZIO 策略也是一个 NP 难题。因此，我们提出了两种算法来找到有效的 ZIO 策略：一种精确算法，其运行时间对于任何固定数量的零售商而言都是多项式；以及一种基于线性编程的启发式算法，其有效性在一系列计算实验中得到证明。最后，我们将本文中提出的最坏情况结果扩展到仓库确实持有库存的系统。
We analyze the problem faced by companies that rely on TL (Truckload) and LTL (Less than Truckload) carriers for the distribution of products across their supply chain. Our goal is to design simple inventory policies and transportation strategies to satisfy time varying demands over a finite horizon, while minimizing system wide cost by taking advantage of quantity discounts in the transportation cost structures. For this purpose, we study the cost effectiveness of restricting the inventory policies to the class of zero-inventory-ordering (ZIO) policies in a single-warehouse multiretailer scenario in which the warehouse serves as a cross-dock facility. In particular, we demonstrate that there exists a ZIO inventory policy whose total inventory and transportation cost is no more than 4/3 (5.6/4.6 if transportation costs are stationary) times the optimal cost. However, finding the best ZIO policy is an NP hard problem as well. Thus, we propose two algorithms to find an effective ZIO policy: An exact algorithm whose running time is polynomial for any fixed number of retailers, and a linear-programming-based heuristic whose effectiveness is demonstrated in a series of computational experiments. Finally, we extend the worst-case results developed in this paper to systems in which the warehouse does hold inventory.