We investigate the value of accounting for demand seasonality in inventory control. We consider a single-location, single-item periodic-review lost sales inventory problem with seasonal demand in a retail environment. Customer demand has seasonality with a known season length, the lead time is shorter than the review period, and orders are placed as multiples of a fixed batch size. The cost str...

In this paper, we establish a new preservation property of quasi-K-concavity under certain optimization operations. One important application of the result is to analyze joint inventory-pricing models for single-product periodic-review inventory systems with concave ordering costs. At each period, an ordering quantity and a selling price of the product are determined simultaneously. Demand is r...

The single-item stochastic inventory control problem is to find an inventory replenishment policy in the presence of independent discrete stochastic demands under periodic review and finite time horizon. In this paper, we prove that this problem is intractable and for any 2 > 0, we design an algorithm with running time polynomial in the size of the problem input and in 1/2, that finds a policy ...

We study a single-product periodic-review inventory model in which the ordering quantity is either zero or at least a minimum order size+ The ordering cost is a linear function of the ordering quantity, and the demand in different time periods are independent random variables+ The objective is to characterize the inventory policies that minimize the total discounted ordering, holding, and backo...

We study periodic-review inventory replenishment problems with fixed ordering costs, and show the optimality of (s, S) inventory replenishment policies. We consider several sales mechanisms, e.g., auction mechanisms, name-your-own-price mechanisms, and multiple heterogeneous sales channels. We prove this result by showing that these models satisfy a condition given by Huh and Janakiraman (2004)...

In the fast-changing business environment, supply chains are affected by the production and inventory strategies, which influence the amount of information needed by the chains. The firms must therefore determine the best supply chain inventory strategies for their products. The lack of precise market demand and reliable supplier’s stock level makes it inappropriate to use the statistically-bas...

We consider a single-product periodic-review inventory system for a retailer who has adopted a dual sourcing strategy to cope with potential supply process interruptions. Orders are placed to a perfectly reliable supplier and/or to a less reliable supplier that offers a better price. The success of an order placed to the unreliable supplier depends on his supply status that has a Markovian natu...

We introduce a real-life problem faced by the blood bank of the Austrian Red Cross for Eastern Austria: how to cost-effectively organize the periodic delivery of blood products to Austrian hospitals. We present various solution approaches, based on integer programming and variable neighborhood search, and empirically evaluate their performance. Moreover, we study the potential value of switchin...