Cyclic ordering policies from capacitated suppliers under limited cycle time

Abstract

In this paper, we study the ordering policy of a manufacturer/retailer which procures a single item from multiple capacitated suppliers and satisfies an exogenous deterministic and constant demand. Manufacturer's objective is to minimize total periodic ordering cost which has three components: (i) fixed ordering cost, (ii) variable purchasing cost, and (iii) inventory holding cost. We are interested in developing a cyclic ordering policy for the manufacturer where the orders are repeated with a certain frequency and the cycle length/time is limited by the manufacturer. We analyze two cases: (i) each supplier receives at most one order from the manufacturer in a cycle, and (ii) suppliers may receive multiple orders from the manufacturer in a cycle. We propose a novel iterative-natured heuristic framework to develop cyclic ordering policies. Computational experiments on randomly generated instances show that the proposed heuristic framework provides better results compared to other methods in the literature, especially in the presence of a restrictive cycle time limitation.