Emergency supply chain management with lateral transshipments and CONWIP

Abstract

To find effective management strategies for emergency supply chain, we build a two-echelon emergency supply chain model with one central warehouse and n retailers. By combining lateral transshipments (LT), emergency replenishments(ER) and CONWIP (Constant Work in Process) strategies, we design two new strategies, LE(LT+ER) and LEC(LT+ER+CONWIP). System dynamics simulations are used to test the effectiveness of the two proposed strategies mentioned above. The experimental results suggest that though LE and LEC both can effectively improve customer service level and reduce cost. However, LEC is better than LE. LEC can obtain less system inventory under the given customer service level. When CONWIP is used in LEC, the emergency supply chain becomes a pull system and has higher performance.