Retail replenishment is a high-value activity. According to the US Commerce Department, $1.1 trillion in inventory supports $3.2 trillion in annual US retail sales [...]. Improving distribution centre efficiency of just a few percentage points through advanced automation and real-time replenishment may deliver significant savings and require less capital to be tied up in inventory. An interesti...

 Normally, the real-world inventory control problems are imprecisely defined and human interventions are often required to solve these decision-making problems. In this paper, a realistic inventory model with imprecise inventory costs have been formulated for deteriorating items under trade credit policy within the economic production quantity (EPQ) framework. We assume that the supplier would...

We study a joint inventory and pricing problem in a single-stage system with a positive lead time. We consider both additive and multiplicative demand forms. This problem is, in general, intractable due to its computational complexity. We develop a simple heuristic that resolves this issue. The heuristic involves a myopic pricing policy that generates each period’s price as a function of the in...

In this paper, we consider a supply chain model consisting of a single product, one supplier and multiple retailers. Demand at the retailers is random, but stationary. Each retailer places her orders to the supplier according to the well known (Q,R) policy. We assume that the supplier has on-line information about the demand as well as inventory activities of the product at each retailer and em...

The Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) involves the distribution of one or more products from a supplier to a set of customers over a discrete planning horizon. The version treated here, the so-called Vendor Managed Inventory Routing Problem (VMIRP), is the Inventory Routing problem arising when the replenishment policy is decided a priori. We consider two replenishment policies. The first is know...

In this paper, we consider inventory models for periodic-review systems with replenishment cycles, which consist of a number of periods. By replenishment cycles, we mean that an order is always placed at the beginning of a cycle. We use dynamic programming to formulate both the backorder and lost-sales models, and propose to charge the holding and shortage costs based on the ending inventory of...

T such as radio-frequency identification and global positioning systems can provide improved real-time tracking information for products and replenishment orders along the supply chain. We call this type of visibility order progress information. In this paper, we investigate how order progress information can be used to improve inventory replenishment decisions. To this end, we examine a retail...

We consider a two echelon supply chain where a single retailer holds an inventory of finished goods to satisfy an i.i.d. customer demand, and a single manufacturer produces the retailer’s replenishment orders on a make-to-order basis. The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of the retailer’s replenishment policy on total supply chain performance. We consider two strategies with reg...

abstractin this study, a vendor-managed inventory model is developed for a single-vendor multiple-retailer single-warehouse (sv-mr-sv) supply chain problem based on the economic order quantity in which demands are stochastic and follow a uniform probability distribution. in order to reduce holding costs and to help balanced on-hand inventory cost between the vendor and the retailers, it is assu...