Abstract: In real life, many agro-foods loose their utility with the passage of storage period and the loss of utility or decay is categorized as deterioration. In order to keep the quality requested by the final customer and reduce relative logistics cost, especially the deteriorated cost, an integrated inventory policy needs to be emphasized among all members in cold chain. However most of the cold chain strategy neglects the importance of integration. Even if a few articles concern with this respect while the compensation policy is rarely proposed. If whose profit lost in an integrated system is not recovered, it is difficult to make the integration into reality.In this paper, an integrated inventory model of a manufacturer, multiple distributors, and multiple retailers is established in a finite horizon to maximize the total system profit when the demand rate is a time-varying function and prices are known. Considering the cold chain inventory adds value compared with the general goods, here it takes the maximum system profit as the basis of decision making in order to preferably show the increased profit brought by the integrated policy.A numerical example with exponential demand rate is given and the results which are calculated by Genetic Algorithm through the Matlab2012a illustrate the proposed model. Through the comparison with the independent retailer-leading decision-making strategy, it is experimented that the integrated strategy results in high total system profit. However, not all of supply chain members benefit from the integrated strategy. Therefore, A profit distribution mechanism then is discussed to coordinate the supply chain partners. Through the introduction of the payment transfer function, the mechanism realizes the profit of each member after being redistributed is larger than the retailer-leading system while the total profit of the chain remains the same after the profit redistribution, which stimulates the alliance among partners. The proposed model can have many potential applications and extensions to multi cold chain items, which could provide theoretical support to the development of cold chain in China.

Key words: multi-echelon, integration, cold chain inventory, profit distribution