A two-warehouse probabilistic model with price discount on backorders under two levels of trade-credit policy

Abstract

It is impossible in this competitive era to assess the demand for items in advance. So, it is essential to refer to a stochastic demand function. In this paper, a probabilistic inventory model for deteriorating items is unfolded. Here, the supplier as well as the retailer adopt the trade-credit policy for their customers with the aim of promoting the market competition. Shortages are included into the model, and when stock on hand is zero, the retailer offers a price discount to those customers who are willing to back-order their demands. We consider two different warehouses in which the first one is an Own Warehouse (OW) where the deterioration is constant over time and the other is a Rented Warehouse (RW), and where the deterioration rate follows a Weibull distribution. An algorithm is provided for finding the solutions of the formulated model.Global convexity of the cost function is established which shows that our proposed model is very helpful for any supplier or retailer to finalize the optimal ordering policy. Beside of this, we target to increase the total profit for retailer by reducing the corresponding total inventory cost. The theoretical concept is justified with the help of some numerical examples. A sensitivity analysis of the optimal solution with respect to the major parameters is also provided in order to stabilize our model. We finalize the paper through a conclusion and a preview onto possible future studies.