Study on Collaborative R&D Strategy between Manufacturer and Supplier Based on Uncertain Demand and Exchange Rate

Imbalance of supply and demand relation in international market and the increasing volatility of exchange rate force the manufacturer to make reasonable R&D (Research and Development) strategy under turbulent market environment, which has become particularly important to enhance the international competitiveness. This paper presents a fuzzy random variable with multifold uncertain attribute to depict the increasing fluctuation of the market demand and the exchange rate, and thus construct two bilevel programming models with fuzzy random variables, which aims to compare two different R&D strategies: manufacturer involved in R&D independently and joint R&D of manufacturer and supplier. According to the characteristics of the two models, this paper designs the corresponding hybrid intelligent algorithms. The results of the two models in numerical examples show that: collaborative R&D strategy between manufacturer and supplier is better than manufacturer’s independent R&D strategy and the optimal proportion of R&D in this paper can be obtained: the supplier shares 50% of the total R&D cost.