Two Stage Supply Chain Optimization for Perishable Products Under Fuzzy Environment

In the changing market scenario, supply chain management is getting phenomenal importance amongst researchers. Studies on supply chain management have emphasized the vitality of a long-term strategic relationship between the supplier, distributor and retailer. In this article, the authors have studied a two-stage supply chain coordination problem under uncertain costs and demand information when integrated procurement and distribution decisions of supply chain has to be employed. The model incorporates a single supplier transporting its products to multiple destinations of a retailer. This process becomes tedious, as when items have an inventory carrying cost incurred due to perishable nature of products. Different discount policies are offered to procure and transport goods from the one stage to other stage. Fuzzy set theory is applied to estimate the uncertainty associated with the input parameters and triangular fuzzy numbers are used to analyze the model. A case is presented to validate the procedure.