Centralized and decentralized replenishment policies considering inventory and transportation in a two-echelon pharmaceutical downstream supply chain
Résumé
This paper studies some problems involved in a pharmaceutical downstream supply chain. Specific constraints must be taken into account. These constraints are related on the one hand to the pharmaceutical products such as the expiry date, the regulations ... and on the other hand to inventory control such as forbidden shortage but excess inventory allowed. It seems that traditional models of inventory control and replenishment cannot optimize the total cost of the system and consequently it is important to also take into account transportation costs. We propose two models for multi-product replenishment policies, centralized or decentralized, which can be applied each one to a product or a specific family of products. Our approach is illustrated on a simple example.