Collaborative Perishable Inventory Management Using Demand and Capacity Sharing Coordination Protocols

摘要

This paper presents capacity and demand sharing protocols to minimize perishable inventory wastes in a collaborative network. Collaboration among enterprises has become an attractive strategy for market adaptation due to the recent development of information and communication technologies. This research investigates the effect of perishable inventory on collaboration, and proposes a strategy to manage the tradeoff between shortage and waste. A fundamental question that arises when designing a perishable inventory sharing strategy is that at which point of a product's lifetime the enterprise should share. To address this question, a collaboration strategy is proposed to find efficient decisions that minimize waste, shortage, and holding costs in the network, while maximizing the demand fulfillment rate. Experiments are conducted on several scenarios including different collaboration models (complete, partial, and no collaboration), network structures, and demand rates. The results indicate that complete collaboration, i.e., sharing the item regardless of its age, provides the highest benefits for the network, and increases each enterprise profit by 7% at least.