Optimal payment time and replenishment decisions for retailer’s inventory system under trade credit and carbon emission constraints

Abstract

This study presents a multi-item inventory and pricing model by considering marketing, service activities, trade credit, carbon emissions, and the restrictions of production cost and storage space. In the proposed model, shortages are allowed and demand rate is a power function of service and marketing costs, and selling price. The main objective of this study is to optimize retailer’s payments time, service and marketing expenditure, and replenishment decisions in order to maximize retailer’s total profit and minimize carbon emissions, simultaneously. Model is developed in a fuzzy environment under carbon tax regulation when the length of credit period provided by supplier is less than or equal to the length of time in which no shortage happens. To solve the proposed model, we first transform the original problem into a multi-objective Signomial Geometric Programming (SGP) problem using fuzzy and hybrid parameters, which minimizes both the mean value and the total dispersion value of the objective function. Then a global optimization problem method has been used to solve the SGP problem. Efficiency of this algorithm is tested and compared with multi-objective genetic algorithm, multi-objective genetic algorithm with varying population, and hybrid heuristic algorithm. At the end, several numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are performed to demonstrate the application of the proposed model and solution procedure to obtain managerial insights.