Presentating a Model for the Vendor-Managed Inventory in a Two-Tier Supply Chain of Perishable Products Under Demand Uncertainty

One of the most common and successful approaches to integrated supply chain management is vendor-managed Inventory. In this policy, a vendor takes control of inventory decisions for a number of retailers. This research aims to examine planning for supply, production, and distribution with an integrated approach to reduce waste and shortages of perishable products in a manner that minimizes costs for both the vendor and retailers in the supply chain, considering the vendor-managed Inventory. Since reducing the costs of waste, shortages, production, and storage of perishable goods is of paramount importance, this research simultaneously investigates the proposed model. In this study, as demand depends on product quality and quality information is not available to the retailer before production, demand follows a random and specific distribution. Since chance constraint programming has been introduced as a powerful tool for decision-making systems, in this study, the problem is modeled using this technique. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the proposed method was validated through a case study of a food supply chain. The results indicated that reducing confidence intervals in stochastic constraints could significantly reduce costs within the organization. This research can provide valuable assistance to managers when reducing waste, shortages, and demand fulfillment is of utmost importance.