Abstract
Vendor managed inventory combines inventory management and transportation. Compared to classical inventory management approaches, this strategy offers various degrees of freedom for the vendor while providing a certain service quality level for the customers. To capture the characteristics of rich real-world scenarios, our problem formulation consists of multiple customers, many products and stochastic product usages. Additionally, we also consider mixed formulations, where only a certain part of the customers is switched to a vendor managed inventory to allow a stepwise transition. We show that resupply and routing policies can be evolved autonomously for those scenarios using a simulation-based optimization approach. By combining inventory management and routing, the resulting policies aim to minimize costs and to maximize resource usage while maintaining a given service level. In order to validate our approach, we perform case studies and apply the evolved rules on a large-scale vendor managed inventory scenario for supermarkets. Furthermore, we show that our methodology can be used to perform a sensitivity analysis by considering the influence of exogenous and endogenous factors on the decision process, if a customer base should be transitioned to a vendor managed inventory.
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Vonolfen, S., Affenzeller, M., Beham, A. et al. Simulation-based evolution of resupply and routing policies in rich vendor-managed inventory scenarios. Cent Eur J Oper Res 21, 379–400 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-011-0232-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-011-0232-5