Inventory Control and Replenishment of Multi-Product Multi-Echelon Based on Time Cost Under JMI Environment

1. Introduction

With the continuous developing of the theory and practice about supply chain management inventory, joint managed inventory as a new supply chain inventory management mean arising at this moment. It is developed on the basis of VMI and unified power, responsibility, profit balance and risk-sharing between the upstream and downstream enterprises’ inventory management mode. JMI emphasis on the node enterprise in the supply chain to join in the cooperation, map out an inventory plan at the same time. It makes each node enterprise in the supply chain consider from mutual coordination and keep the forecast of demand in different enterprises consisting in order to slack the “bullwhip effect”. At present, many scholars doing a lot research on the mode of JMI and the replenishment strategy. However, the research literature of time cost are scarce and most of them just introduces the concept of joint managed inventory, do not give a specific mathematical model to optimizing and rarely consider the effect of time cost to inventory costs. Most of the arguments are confined to a single product or two echelon hypothesis, but actually operation of the enterprise often involves the multi-product inventory management. So this paper which aiming at multi-product multi-level inventory management not only has theoretical meaning, but also practical application value.