Abstract
Material ordering and inventory control in the supply chain are studied so that the appropriate policy among members in the chain can be established. We analyze and compare the effect of two main controlling policies, which are decentralized and centralized control. The supply chain in this study consists of one supplier, one manufacturer and one retailer under stochastic customer demand and lead-time delivery. Considering the complexity of such models, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is introduced to optimize and suggest the best setting of interested decision variables from each system for comparison. The results show that the centralized control with coordinating policy outperforms the decentralized control and can achieve better results for all members.