Determination of the optimal sales level of perishable goods in a two-echelon supply chain network

Abstract

In recent years, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been the main focus in many industries in order to decrease costs and improve efficiencies. In today’s supply chains, sale determination for a product in a specific time period and for a specific customer is highly considered. The importance of this efficiency is increased when dealing with perishable products, such as blood, vaccine, foods, etc. These products not only have various customers, but they also must be used before perishing. This paper represents a model to determine the optimal sales level of perishable products in a two-echelon supply chain, using a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) policy. Based on the literature most studies have considered two-echelon supply chain for perishable products with one buyer. The proposed model is formulated based on one vendor and multiple buyers. Considering buyers’ requests in various periods, this model aims to optimize the sales profit by exact and meta-heuristics methods. Three efficient meta-heuristics including GA, PSO and CPSO are utilized to solve the problem and the results showed the good consistency with the results obtained from exact method. The obtained results show that applying VMI policy on two-echelon supply chain for perishable products is an effective approach to optimize the profitability of the proposed network.