A multi-vendor multi-buyer integrated production-inventory model with synchronised unequal-sized batch delivery

Integrating vendors’ and buyers’ production-inventory systems can significantly reduce the total costs incurred by both parties. In this paper, we study the synchronised multi-vendor multiple-buyer integrated production-inventory system with a production flow where the lot sizes follow a geometric sequence. We model this new problem with the objective to minimise the total cost incurred by the vendors and the buyers and determine the optimal production shipment policy. The computational experiments realised on real case study show the efficiency of the developed model for optimising production shipment and synchronisation of vendor-buyer inventories.