An Integrated Inventory Model for a Three-Layer Supply Chain with Multiple Items
In this paper, we investigate an inventory and production system in a three-layer supply chain system involving a single supplier, single manufacturer and multiple retailers. Earlier study in this type of supply chain only consider a single raw material in order to produce single item, but we consider raw materials in order to produce multiple items. It is assumed that the cycle time at each stage is an integer multiple of the adjacent downstream stage. We develop an iterative solution procedure to find the order quantity for the multiple items and raw materials that minimizes the supply chain-wide total cost per unit time of the supplier and manufacturer’s raw materials ordering and holding, setup and finished items holding, the retailer’s ordering and inventory holding. Numerical examples are presented to show that the proposed heuristic gives good performance.