This paper studies a single-item lot-based supplying and batch production under a bilateral capacity reservation contract based on a partnership structure in which some suppliers, a manufacturer, and a third-party logistics provider are connected through long-term cooperation agreements. This configures a partnership supply chain and promotes the manufacturer’s performance in a continuous improvement cycle. Since in this paper, it is assumed that the products are perishable, there is not any inventory storage. Moreover, due to a settled contract, the final products are delivered by third-party logistics corporate providing vehicles according to the products’ features, their expiration time lengths, customers’ demands and other considerations in each period. Thus, the delivery batch size, which is equal to the vehicle capacity in a full truckload mode, is targeted for the manufacturer operations resulting in a dynamic improvement environment. In this problem, respect to the performance level of the manufacturer, in each period, a certain capacity is reserved at each selected supplier level according to the appointed batch deliveries. Here, in addition to the ordinary costs incurred due to ordering and delivery processes, some penalties are imposed for orders/delivers exceeding or falling behind the reserved capacity. After investigating the computational complexity of the problem, we propose three dynamic programming algorithm as well. Finally, numerical results and some potential future researches are presented.
