Offsetting inventory cycles of items sharing storage

The ability to determine the optimal frequencies and offsets for independent and unrestricted ordering cycles for multiple items can be very valuable for managing storage capacity constrained facilities in a supply chain. The complexity of this problem has resulted in researchers focusing on more tractable surrogate problems that are special cases of the base problem. This research has focused on developing fundamental properties of the original problem. We exploit the problem structure and present a heuristic for offsetting independent and unrestricted ordering cycles for items to minimize their joint storage requirements. Heuristics of this type may prove useful in solving the more general problem of selecting order quantities to minimize combined holding, ordering, and storage costs. 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.