| Summary: | In the joint replenishment process, suppliers tend to provide various
kinds of quantity discounts to retailers and it could result in some
substantial cost saving. Previous studies have realized the
importance of quantity discounts in joint replenishment problems and
researches have paid the most attention to the JRP and JRP of a single
product with multi quantity discounts or multi-products with a single
quantity discount. However, they ignored the fact that in reality,
suppliers will offer different kinds of quantity discounts for different
products in the joint replenishment and vendors would not only buy
one kind of product from suppliers. Therefore, this dissertation aims
at finding the effects of different quantity discounts on multi-item
joint replenishment.
In the dissertation, the mathematical JRP model, considering two
mainly used discounts: the all-unit discount, the incremental discount,
is constructed to build the connection between the total cost,
replenishment time intervals and order frequencies. After that, the
corresponding heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the model
and find the optimal solutions, minimum total cost, for JRP under
different discounts. A computational experiment with a case of five
products is made to find the features and differences of JRP with
different quantity discounts.
The results of this study make contributions to the gap in the
literature. Also, it has the practical value that suppliers and retailers
could utilize one model or algorithms to obtain the optimal solution
and make a proper decision under different quantity discounts,
instead of transforming between different models. And the
summarized characteristics and differences can help people better
understand when to use different quantity discounts.
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