PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF A TWO-STAGE PRODUCTIONDISTRIBUTION SYSTEM WITH BATCH ORDERS AND FINITE TRANSPORTATION TIME

摘要

This paper proposes an analytical method for performance evaluation and optimization of a production-distribution system composed of a warehouse supplied from an upstream manufacturing plant. Customer orders arrive randomly with random order size and the production capacity is finite. Transportation time from plant to warehouse is fixed. The analytical approach needs only the first two moments of random variables of the system to evaluate the order-to-delivery leadtime of the warehouse, the total inventory on order, the inventory holding, backlogging cost and fill rate. We use a gradient-based method to minimize the average total inventory cost subject to fill rate requirement. Numerical comparisons with simulation show that the analytical approach is very efficient.