Theoretical Analysis on the Distribution and Replenishment Scheduling Problem in a Sea Cargo Supply Chain

摘要

This study considers a sea cargo supply chain in which a supply cargo loads one sort of raw material at the supply port, ships the loaded raw material to the hub, and takes other kinds of raw material from the hub back to the demand ports on its route to meet their demands. Those sea cargos (other than supply cargos) deliver all categories of raw material from the hub to the demand ports on their routes. The focus of this study is to coordinate the replenishment schedule of the sea cargos, to deliver each kind of raw material to the hub to meet the demands of each port, so as to minimize the average total operations costs incurred in the whole sea cargo supply chain. In order to solve this problem, we formulate a mathematical model given a specified order on the replenishment cycle times of the sea cargos. Before proposing our solution approaches, we conduct full theoretical analysis on the optimality structure of the optimal objective function curve in this paper.