缩短订货提前期的汽车动态生产计划

为缩短客户从提交订单到领取汽车时间,通过对汽车企业定制化生产供应链要素分析,以订单处理带动生产管理改进.通过改善企业软能力,增强应对市场应变能力,允许一定提前期的订单修改,减少订单处理与等待时间;为适应订单的变化,生产中管理中采用“漏斗模型”,利用粗集理论制定动态生产计划,提高生产效率,达到最终减少客户等待时间目的.     

Contract and product quality in platform selling

More and more e-tailers (platforms) are allowing manufacturers direct access to customers. Two common contracts are offered by platforms to manufacturers: the revenue sharing contract where a platform appropriates a portion of the manufacturer’s revenue, and the fixed fee contract where a platform charges a fixed rent for each sale. Using an analytical model, this paper studies the interrelationship between a platform’s contract choice and a manufacturer’s product quality decision. We find that if product quality is exogenously given, the platform will always adopt the revenue sharing contract. If the manufacturer endogenously decides the quality, however, the platform’s contract choice may be changed. This is because the revenue sharing contract, compared to fixed fee, leads to a lower selling price of the manufacturer, whereas the fixed fee contract can motivate a higher quality than does revenue sharing. As a result, a large (small) market heterogeneity induces the platform to adopt the revenue sharing (fixed fee) contract. We also extend the model to several directions, finding that longer product line, manufacturer competition, lower marginal production cost, and higher platform cost all tend to induce the platform to put forward a fixed fee contract; while if quality decision is less flexible than contract decision, the platform is more ready to embrace revenue sharing. Besides, when there are two platforms competing for the same market, they should differentiate their contract choices so as to mitigate competition.     

A Dynamic Supplier Selection and Inventory Management Model for a Serial Supply Chain with a Novel Supplier Price Break Scheme and Flexible Time Periods

A new supplier price break and discount scheme taking into account order frequency and lead time is introduced and incorporated into an integrated inventory planning model for a serial supply chain that minimizes the overall incurred cost including procurement, inventory holding, production, and transportation. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is presented addressing this multi-period, multi-supplier, and multi-stage problem with predetermined time-varying demand for the case of a single product. Then, the length of the time period is considered as a variable. A new MILP formulation is derived when each period of the model is split into multiple sub-periods, and under certain conditions, it is proved that the optimal solution and objective value of the original model form a feasible solution and an upper bound for the derived model. In a numerical example, three scenarios of the derived model are solved where the number of sub-period is set to 2, 3, and 4. The results further show the decrease of the optimal objective value as the length of the time period is shortened. Sufficient evidence demonstrates that the length of the time period has a significant influence on supplier selection, lot sizing allocation, and inventory planning decisions. This poses the necessity of the selection of appropriate length of a time period, considering the trade-off between model complexity and cost savings.     

Vendor managed inventory contracts – coordinating the supply chain while looking from the vendor’s perspective

The paper studies coordination of a supply chain when the inventory is managed by the vendor (VMI). We also provide a general mathematical framework that can be used to analyze contracts under both retailer managed inventory (RMI) and VMI. Using a simple newsvendor scenario with a single vendor and single retailer, we study five popular coordinating supply chain contracts: buyback, quantity flexibility, quantity discount, sales rebate, and revenue sharing contracts. We analyze the ability of these contracts to coordinate the supply chain under VMI when the vendor freely decides the quantity. We find that even though all of them coordinate under RMI, quantity flexibility and sales rebate contracts do not generally coordinate under VMI. Furthermore, buyback and revenue sharing contracts are equivalent. Hence, we propose two new contracts which coordinate under VMI (one of which coordinates under RMI too, provided a well-known assumption holds). Finally, we extend our analysis to consider multiple independent retailers with the vendor incurring linear or convex production cost, and show that our results are qualitatively unchanged.     

Stationary distribution of a stochastic food chain chemostat model with general response functions

In this paper, we focus on a food chain chemostat model with general response functions, perturbed by white noise. Under appropriate assumptions, we establish sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique ergodic stationary distribution by using stochastic Lyapunov analysis method. Our main effort is to construct the suitable Lyapunov function.     

Bullwhip effect in a supply chain model with multiple delivery delays

We develop a model of differential equations for a supply chain with delivery time delays between every adjacent firms. Based on the supply chain model, we provide a new perspective of the bullwhip effect and show that the bullwhip effect is intrinsic in supply chains in the sense that the equilibrium state of each firm in the supply chain is a cumulative forward product of the ratios of order fulfillment and placement between adjacent firms toward the end customer demand. We also show that it is the multiple time delays instead of the constant end consumer demand that determine the stability of the equilibrium states. However, the consumer demand has impacts on the stability of the equilibrium states of the supply chain when the end retailer’s inventory decisions are linearly related to the end consumer demand.     

Derivation of mean-field equations for stochastic particle systems

We study stochastic particle systems on a complete graph and derive effective mean-field rate equations in the limit of diverging system size, which are also known from cluster aggregation models. We establish the propagation of chaos under generic growth conditions on particle jump rates, and the limit provides a master equation for the single site dynamics of the particle system, which is a non-linear birth death chain. Conservation of mass in the particle system leads to conservation of the first moment for the limit dynamics, and to non-uniqueness of stationary distributions. Our findings are consistent with recent results on exchange driven growth, and provide a connection between the well studied phenomena of gelation and condensation.     

User-friendly guarantees for the Langevin Monte Carlo with inaccurate gradient

In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly overdamped) Langevin diffusion and establish guarantees on its error measured in the Wasserstein-2 distance. Our guarantees improve or extend the state-of-the-art results in three directions. First, we provide an upper bound on the error of the first-order Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm with optimized varying step-size. This result has the advantage of being horizon free (we do not need to know in advance the target precision) and to improve by a logarithmic factor the corresponding result for the constant step-size. Second, we study the case where accurate evaluations of the gradient of the log-density are unavailable, but one can have access to approximations of the aforementioned gradient. In such a situation, we consider both deterministic and stochastic approximations of the gradient and provide an upper bound on the sampling error of the first-order LMC that quantifies the impact of the gradient evaluation inaccuracies. Third, we establish upper bounds for two versions of the second-order LMC, which leverage the Hessian of the log-density. We provide non asymptotic guarantees on the sampling error of these second-order LMCs. These guarantees reveal that the second-order LMC algorithms improve on the first-order LMC in ill-conditioned settings.     

竞争型“以旧换再”闭环供应链策略选择及生产决策研究

针对两阶段闭环供应链系统,研究了古诺竞争型闭环供应链中的“以旧换再”策略选择问题。研究发现:(1)企业如何及何时实施“以旧换再”策略取决于自身及竞争企业的再制造水平。再制造水平不仅影响了企业的“以旧换再”数量,同时还会影响产品市场份额及利润。(2)“以旧换再”策略可以提高企业竞争力,增加企业产品市场份额和提高收益;(3)提高 “以旧换再”补贴及再制造产品接受度, 降低“二手市场”价格,均可以降低企业实施“以旧换再”策略和提高企业的“以旧换再”数量。     

专业零售商与厂家直售商的多渠道供应价格博弈的混沌动力学研究

在零售市场,专业零售商与厂家直售商的价格竞争日益突起,再次背景下构建了专业零售商和厂家直售商组成的多渠道供应链价格博弈模型。利用管理学、经济学以及混沌动力学有关理论,对多渠道供应链中各渠道间长期价格博弈的动态演化过程进行理论验证和数据仿真,研究了专业零售商和厂家直售商的价格决策变量的变化给市场带来的影响。研究表明,双方价格决策变量的不断增加,市场从稳定进入混沌无序状态。采用调整参数可以对混沌进行有效的控制,研究结果具有较好的理论和实际应用价值。