This paper considers a two-echelon distribution system which consists of a single warehouse serving N (possibly non-identical) retailers that face discrete stochastic demand of the customers. The warehouse orders from an exogenous supplier with ample stock. Orders arrive at the warehouse after a fixed leadtime. The warehouse satisfies, if possible, the replenishment requests from the retailers....

Given stock allocation in an inventory system, it is necessary to do reallocation periodically to address inventory imbalance and maximize availability. In this paper, we allow two opportunities to perform reallocation within a replenishment cycle. We derive a mathematical model to dynamically determine when to reallocate and how to reallocate. Experimental results show that multiplereallocatio...

The research in this paper is motivated by a real life spare parts networks for complex technical systems in oil refining sector. At the customers the availability of the installed technical systems often is essential for the primary process. Hence, they require a high availability. For improve the management of the spare parts inventory the main company (the customer) has developed a new strat...

University. One of my reasons for choosing RAND rather than a more conventional academic appointment was my desire to be involved in applied rather than abstract mathematics. I could not have selected a better location to achieve this particular goal. George Dantzig had arrived recently and was in the process of applying linear programming techniques to a growing body of basic problems. Richard...

A central question in supply chain management is how to coordinate activities and inventories over a large number of stages and locations, while providing a high level of service to end customers. One theoretically and practically important methodology for addressing this problem is the guaranteed service (GS) framework, in which the stages of the supply chain operate according to base stock po...

We show the optimality of state dependent echelon base stock policies in uncapacitated serial inventory systems with Markov modulated demand and Markov modulated stochastic leadtimes in the absence of order crossing. Our results cover finite time horizon problems as well as infinite time horizon formulations, with either a discounted or an average cost criterion. We employ a novel approach, bas...

Inventory is lifeblood in an organization. Multiechelon inventory of Olympia paper mill, Khyber Pakhtonkhwa is optimized by efficient management of the organizational supply chain (SC). A supply chain is designed starting from raw material receiving from supplier up to finished good delivered to the customer. The on-going setup of the selected organization is traditional based on the experience...

Inventory control is a crucial activity for many companies. Given the recent advances in information technology, there have never been greater opportunities for coordinated inventory control across supply chain facilities. But how do we design efficient control methods and policies that take advantage of the detailed information that is now becoming available? This doctoral thesis investigates ...

e establish lower bounds on the minimum costs of managing certain productiondistribution networks with setup costs at all stages and stochastic demands. These networks include serial, assembly, and one-warehouse multi-retailer systems. We obtain the bounds through novel cost-allocation schemes. We evaluate the bounds' performance for one-warehouse multi-retailer systems by comparing them with s...

Globalization, product proliferation and fast product innovation have significantly increased the complexities of supply chains in many industries. One of the most important advancements of supply chain management in recent years is the development of models and methodologies for controlling inventory in general supply networks under uncertainty, and their wide-spread applications to industry. ...