Suppliers' Coordination of Production and Delivery Decisions under Batch Size Constraints
Résumé
We consider the problem of coordinating production and delivery of a set of products ordered by a unique customer to different suppliers. Each supplier is producing the ordered quantity of one of the products. Each supplier is incurring an inventory cost per product item per unit of time from time 0 until the shipping time of the item, and a fixed delivery cost per loaded ruck. For economic reasons, the customer may accept to receive an ordered quantity split on many deliveries of small batches provided that each delivered quantity is greater than or equal to a minimum quantity threshold. Besides, delivered quantities must be less than or equal to a full truckload. The group of suppliers is considering mutualizing their deliveries. Deliveries mutualization supposes that the suppliers are synchronizing their deliveries, each of them contributing to all delivery batches. In this paper, we study this cooperative model and provide solution algorithms.