On finite production rate model with quality assurance, multi-customer, and discontinuous deliveries

摘要

This study extends a prior work on the finite production rate (FPR) model with quality assurance, multi-customer, and discontinuous deliveries [1], with the purpose of reducing stock holding costs for both vendor and customers. We introduce an alternative product distribution policy which includes an extra delivery of finished items during production uptime to meet customers' product demands for the periods of vendor's uptime and reworking time. After the entire lot is produced and quality assured, multiple shipments are synchronously transported to different customers. The objective of this study is to find optimal production-shipment policy that minimizes the long-run average system costs for the proposed supply chains system, and verify the research result gives significant savings in holding costs as compared to the prior work [1]. Mathematical modeling and Hessian matrix equations are employed to derive optimal operating production-shipment policy for the proposed model. Through a numerical example, we demonstrate practical usages of our research result and significant savings in stock holding costs for both vendor and customers.