In this paper, we deal with the case of a network made up of a distribution center that supplies several retailers. We assume that the demand Di (i = 1, 2, 3)at site i follows a normal distribution with mean μ i and standard deviation σi (known). Retailers work together in the event of a shortage of inventory by shifting the necessary amount of transshipment to meet expected customer demand. The model is an extension of previous work by (Meissner and Rusyaeva (2016)) where transshipment between more than two retailers is permitted. Such an extension introduces an additional complicating element which is the strategy of lateral transfer of product in the following two situations: (1) when 'at least one retailer faces a shortage of stock at the end of a periodicity noted as "T When two or more other retailers have excess stock, (2) when two or more retailers are faced with insufficient stock and they request the missing quantity from only one retailer who has excess. The objective of this paper is to study the performance of a distribution system made up of a central warehouse and three retailers and to assess the collaboration both at the level of Average Global Profit and of the Average Global Desservice level.

Keywords : Transshipment, Discrete Event Simulation (DES), Vendor-Managed Inventory, Metamodel-Based Simulation, Desirability Function Approach, PartialPooling Threshold.