The inventory system under consideration consists of one central warehouse and an arbitrary number of retailers controlled by a continuous review inventory policy (R;Q). Independent Poisson demands are assumed with constant transportation times for all retailers and a constant lead time for replenishing orders from an external supplier for the warehouse. Unsatis ed demands are assumed to be los...

Simultaneously reducing inventory levels of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished items has become a major focus for supply chain management. In order to achieve a higher degree of coordination and automation among the supply chain parties, the supply chain sometimes invests in reducing the ordering cost to streamline and speed up transactions via the application of information technolog...

This paper studies a buyer’s procurement strategies in a two-stage supply chain with price-sensitive demand. The buyer procures a product from a supplier and then sells to the marketplace. Market demand is stochastic and depends on the buyer’s selling price. The supplier’s production cost is private information, and the buyer only knows the distribution of the cost. Both the buyer and the suppl...

This paper deals with an inventory system with one central warehouse and a number of identical retailers. We consider perishable-on-theshelf items; that is, all items have a fixed shelf life and start to age on their arrival at the retailers. Each retailer faces Poisson demand and employs (1, T) inventory policy. Although demand not met at a retailer is lost, the unsatisfied demand at the centr...

Devising manufacturing/distribution strategies for supply chains and determining their parameter values have been challenging problems. Linking production management to stock keeping processes improves the planning of the supply chain activities, including material management, culminating in improved customer service levels. In this study, we investigate a multi-echelon supply chain consisting ...

We consider a two-echelon inventory system where the exogenous demands occur only at the retailer locations, and the demand rates are functions of an underlying continuoustime Markov chain. This underlying process may represent, for example, general economic conditions, the number of active users in the system, etcetera. Each retailer location follows a base-stock policy that is independent of ...

Previous researchers have developed ways of managing forward-oriented supply chains, and gave insight to solve single-stage inventory systems. In this study, we analyze an inventory system with traditional forward-oriented material flow as well as a reverse material flow supply chain. In the reverse material flow, the used products are returned, remanufactured and shipped to the retailer for re...

In this research, a new two-echelon model has been presented to control the inventory of perishable goods. The performance of the model lies in a supply chain and is based on real conditions and data. The main purpose of the model is to minimize the maintenance cost of the entire chain. However, if the good is perished before reaching the customer (the expiration date is over)...

We consider a two-stage serial inventory system whose cost structure exhibits economies of scale in both stages. In the system, stage 1 faces Poisson demand and replenishes its inventory from stage 2, and the latter stage in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock. Each shipment, either to stage 2 or to stage 1, incurs a fixed setup cost. We derive important properties for a g...

This paper analyses an infinite horizon two-echelon supply chain inventory problem and shows that a sequence of the optimum ordering policies does not yield globally optimal solutions for the overall supply chain. First-order autoregressive demand pattern is assumed and each participant adopts the order-up-to (OUT) policy with a minimum mean square error forecasting scheme to generate replenish...