Title: Multi-store food retailing problem with outsourcing purchase operation: a case study in Japan

Authors: Masatoshi Sakawa; Ichiro Nishizaki; Takeshi Matsui; Tomohiro Hayashida

Addresses: Department of System Cybernetics, Graduate School of Engineering, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8527, Japan ' Department of System Cybernetics, Graduate School of Engineering, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8527, Japan ' Department of System Cybernetics, Graduate School of Engineering, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8527, Japan ' Department of System Cybernetics, Graduate School of Engineering, Higashi-Hiroshima, 739-8527, Japan

Abstract: In this paper, we deal with the multi-store food retailing problem with outsourcing purchase operation, which is modelled as a two-level formulation, and we assume that the food retailer which is a primal decision maker has several stores in Japan and contracts with a distributer to purchase farm products to cope with Japanese customers' behaviour. That is, the food retailer deals with vegetables and fruits which are purchased from the distributer; the distributer buys vegetables and fruits ordered from the food retailer at the central wholesale markets in several cities, and transports them by truck from each of the central wholesaler markets to the food retailer's storehouses. Due to optimisation of transportation of the farm products, the multi-store food retailing problem with outsourcing purchase operation is formally formulated as a three-level linear programming problem. We solve the multi-store problem together with the underlying single decision maker problem and outsourcing problem with a single store in order to demonstrate the solution characteristics of the multi-store problem.

Keywords: purchasing outsourcing; food retailing; multi-store operations; Stackelberg solution; three-level linear programming problem; Japan; modelling; farm products; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2014.065410

International Journal of Operational Research, 2014 Vol.21 No.3, pp.293 - 321

Received: 17 Aug 2012
Accepted: 22 Feb 2013
Published online: 31 Oct 2014 *

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