abstract
- © 2021 Elsevier LtdIn many real-world situations, a distributor visits a downstream retailer to receive orders of products with fixed shelf-life and then delivers them after a lead-time. Under such circumstances, the retailer should determine its safety stock level by considering the demand uncertainty and the distributor's visit interval. In this paper, we coordinate the safety stock level of the retailer with the visit interval and the replenishment policy of the distributor, where the distributor is subject to two types of shelf-life constraints: (1) fixed shelf-life for the product, and (2) minimum remaining shelf life required by the retailer. A fair profit-sharing strategy is developed to coordinate the investigated SC and to encourage both members to participate in a joint decision-making scheme. The results reveal that the proposed coordination policy not only coordinates the SC of products with fixed shelf-life but also significantly improves the customer service level (CSL) and the profits of the entire SC and its agents. Further, sensitivity analyses have been carried out to analyze the performance of the proposed coordination model under different circumstances.