Downstream and Upstream Information Sharing in Supply Chain with Fuzzy Demand

Information sharing issue is addressed in a three level supply chain with fuzzy demand. The chain consists of an upstream supplier, a manufacturer and a retailer, all of who adopt the order-up-to policy with a periodic review procedure to replenish their stock. The external demand is a fuzzy auto-correlated AR (1) process. The impact of upstream and downstream information sharing is investigated quantitatively on the supplier, and it is shown that the supplier´s performance depends significantly on where information sharing happened. The results obtained are counterintuitive: the supplier could benefit more from indirect downstream demand information sharing than from direct upstream order information sharing. Finally, numerical examples are provided to validate our analysis and illustrate the sensitivity of supplier´s performance to demand characteristics and replenishment lead times.