"Evaluating strategic issues in the supply chain scheduling considering batch delivery "

  Student: Ayatollah Karamouzian

  Advisor: Dr. Mahdavi Mazdeh

  Co-Advisors : Dr. Jalali – Dr. Heydari

  Internal Committee Members: Dr.Makuee-Dr.Sajjadi

  External Committee Members: Dr.July-Dr.Esmaeli

  Abstract:

  The issue of supply chain management has been extensively studied in the past decades. However, the concept of supply chain scheduling (SCS) is relatively a recent topic and has been less discussed. Classical scheduling theory focuses on a single decision maker looking for optimizing its schedule based on a specific objective function. By contrast, SCS deals with scheduling problems with multiple agents across multiple supply chain stages. The main goal of SCS studies is to find an optimal scheduling and delivering decision that yields the best performance or least cost for the whole supply chain (SC) .Nevertheless, it is observed that this strategy is usually against some members of the SC and therefore they might not be interested to cooperate and apply the optimal strategy. Hence, it is necessary to find a cooperation mechanism to persuaded all partners to adopt the optimal strategy. Unfortunately, this aspect of SCS called “strategic issues” is not completely evaluated in the relevant literature despite its importance. In this study, considering the gap, we firstly determine the optimal scheduling and batch delivery decisions of SC agents through developing mathematical models and then present the difference between individual and joint decision making of the agents on the supply chain costs. Secondly, we analyze the game of players and their strategies in the SC and finally a revenue sharing mechanism based on the bargaining powers of the players is introduced to practically define the method of cooperation in the SC.

  The numerical study demonstrates that the cooperation on scheduling and batching can reduce the costs of SC up to 30% or more, depending on the parameters of SC. Additionally, it shows that the sharing mechanism is beneficial to all agents and can motivate the partners of the SC to cooperate in real world environment. We believe that this kind of study can remarkably effective for cooperation contracts specially in a make to order environment and independent SCs.