Aggregate production planning (APP) is concerned with determining the optimum production and workforce levels for each period over the medium term planning horizon. It aims to set overall production levels for each product family to meet fluctuating demand in the near future. APP is one of the most critical areas of production planning systems. After the state-of-the-art summaries in 1992 by Nam and Logendran [ Nam, S. J., & Logendran, R. (1992). Aggregate production planning—a survey of models and methodologies. European Journal of Operational Research, 61(3), 255-272. ], which specifically summarized the various existing techniques from 1950 to 1990 into a framework depending on their abilities to either produce an exact optimal or near-optimal solution, there has not been any systematic survey in the literature. This paper reviews the literature on APP models to meet two main purposes. First, a systematic structure for classifying APP models is proposed. Second, the existing gaps in the literature are demonstrated in order to extract future directions of this research area. This paper covers a variety of APP models’ characteristics including modeling structures, important issues, and solving approaches, in contrast to other literature reviews in this field which focused on methodologies in APP models. Finally some directions for future research in this research area are suggested.

Supply chain members cannot act independently and they need to act as a part of a unified system and coordinated with other members. Therefore, a coordination mechanism may be necessary to motivate members to achieve coordination. In this paper, the coordination problem is studied in a two-level supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer where demand is a function of price and advertising expenditures in two scenarios. The first scenario is “No coordination”, and the other scenario is “coordination with Revenue sharing contract”. The models are solved using game theory, Cooperative and Nash equilibrium. Finally, numerical examples are presented indicating that the average expected profit in the second scenario, coordination with revenue sharing, is higher than the first scenario. In addition numerical examples indicate that as price and advertising elasticity to demand increase, profitability of supply chain decreases.

In the recent decade, studying the economic order quantity (EOQ) models with imperfect quality has appealed to many researchers. Only few papers are published discussing EOQ models with imperfect items in a supply chain. In this paper, a two-echelon decentralized supply chain consisting of a manufacture and a supplier that both face just in time (JIT) inventory problem is considered. It is sought to find the optimal number of the shipments and the quantity of each shipment in a way that minimizes the both manufacturer’s and the supplier’s cost functions. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first paper that deals with imperfect items in a decentralized supply chain. Thereby, three different game theoretical solution approaches consisting of two non-cooperative games and a cooperative game are proposed. Comparing the results of three different scenarios with those of the centralized model, the conclusions are drawn to obtain the best approach.

Co-op advertising is an interactive relationship between manufacturer and retailer(s) supply chain and makes up the majority of marketing budget in many product lines for manufacturers and retailers. This paper considers pricing and co-op advertising decisions in two-stage supply chain and develops a monopolistic retailer and duopolistic retailer & apos; s model. In these models, the manufacturer and the retailers play the Nash, Manufacturer-Stackelberg and cooperative game to make optimal pricing and co-op advertising decisions. A bargaining model is utilized for determine the best pricing and co-op advertising scheme for achieving full coordination in the supply chain.

This paper studies the issue of channel coordination for a decentralized supply chain consisting of one vendor and one buyer in multi-period setting. Considering the allowance of the backorder at the buyer side distinguishes this work in the literature. The credit option contract as an incentive scheme is pursued to encourage the buyer to participate in the coordination model. Order quantity, credit time and backordered demand in each period as decision variables are determined jointly in order to encourage the chain’s member to participate in the coordinating contract. The proposed model shows that the credit option contract for the case of backorder allowance is able to realize the channel coordination in the studied supply chain. A wide range of numerical examples are studied to analyze the sensitivity of the contract efficiency to the inventory system’s parameters such as order cost, holding cost and shortage cost.