Study of vendor managed inventory of railway logistics center based on system dynamics

Abstract

Railway transportation is an important part of the national transportation system and the railway logistics centers are the key nodes of the national logistics system. The logistics centers must be running appropriately to keep the society logistics system functioning well. One of the significant tasks of running them is the inventory management policy, which has been recognized both by industry and academia. The inventory management policies, distribution strategies, and information sharing policies and technologies affect the long-term profitability of the entire supply chain. In this paper, system dynamics (SD) is adopted as a modeling and analysis tool to tackle strategic issues for railway logistics center inventory management. The vendor managed inventory (VMI) is introduced to set up the function module, and the SD model of inventory management is developed. The model should be helpful to decision makers in efficient decision-making to increase the profitability of the entire supply chain. © ASCE.