Shipping Strategies Problem in a three-echelon Logistics System

This paper considers a three-echelon logistics system,which consists of multiple suppliers,a central warehouse(CW) and multiple customers.We assume that the CW and customers perform periodic replenishment strategies.We also assume that each customer faces a deterministic demand rate for any of products.With given a set of feasible frequencies our objective is to find the optimal replenishment strategy of the CW and the optimal shipping strategy of each customer,which minimizes the long-run average costs of the system. In this paper we derive two dominance rules for the problem solutions.The numerical experiment shows that the enumeration-followed-by-optimization algorithms is efficient.