Developing an integrated inventory management model for multi-item multi-echelon supply chain

As the industrial environment becomes more competitive, supply chain management (SCM) has attained growing attention from practical and academic societies as a crucial discipline. Among the involved decisions in the field of SCM, integrated inventory management is addressed in this paper. In this regards, this paper proposes an integrated inventory management model within a multi-item, multi-echelon supply chain (SC). The considered SC comprises multiple agents in upper layers supplying those of lower layer to enhance flexibility of the SC. Furthermore, three inventory models are developed with respect to different layers of SC in an integrated manner, seeking to optimize total cost of the whole SC. Due to nonlinear structure of the proposed model; high level of computational complexity is resulted. To cope with the complexity of proposed model, a differential evolution algorithm is adopted. Conducted numerical results indicate validity of the developed algorithm.