Online retail reduces the costs of obtaining information about a product’s price and availability and of flexibly timing a purchase. Consequently, consumers can strategically time their purchases, weighing the costs of monitoring and the risk of inventory depletion against prospectively lower prices. At the same time, firms can observe and exploit their customers’ monitoring behavior. Using a d...

We consider a periodic-review, serial inventory system, in which each stage replenishes inventory according to an echelon-stock (r, nQ, T ) policy – a standard echelon-stock (r, nQ) policy executed every T periods. Demands are independent, identically distributed in different periods and occur at the most downstream stage. Two types of fixed costs are considered: setup cost and replenishment co...

Uncertainty theory has got quite attention after it was pioneered by Baoding Liu in 2007. Uncertainty is the newest area among the concepts to express imprecise quantities which can be expressed by the ambiguity of human language. Such an unpredictable value can be neither accurately described by probability theory nor fuzzy logic. In inventory models, costs are very prominent part of the syste...

In designing a supply chain, firms are often faced with the competing demands of improved customer service and reduced cost. We develop a model that incorporates fixed distribution center location costs, working and safety stock inventory costs at the distribution centers, fixed and variable transport costs from a plant to the distribution centers and delivery costs to customers. Service is mea...

This article provides a decision tool to assist small business managers in their search for an appropriate inventory management system. In the article, a functional taxonomy that would match various small business sectors with certain operational consideration points is proposed. This taxonomy is basically a two-dimensional decision matrix that can equip these managers with various perspectives...

We consider the optimal control of a production inventory-system with a single product and two customer classes where items are produced one unit at a time. Upon arrival, customer orders can be fulfilled from existing inventory, if there is any, backordered, or rejected. The two classes are differentiated by their backorder and lost sales costs. At each decision epoch, we must determine whether...

Increasing energy efficiency is one of the main objectives of the Directive 2009/28/EC of the European Commission (called 20-20-20), which aims at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by jointly increasing the use of renewable energy and improving energy efficiency, all by 20% until 2020. To reduce energy consumption in producing and distributing products, it is of major importance to consider e...

This study has extended a vehicle routing problem, with time-windows (VRPTW), by considering the randomness of the perishable food delivery process, and constructing a SVRPTWmodel, to obtain optimal delivery routes, loads, fleet dispatching and departure times for delivering perishable food from a distribution center. Our objective was to minimize not only the fixed costs for dispatching vehicl...

We consider a model for a serial supply chain in which production, inventory, and transportation decisions are integrated, in the presence of production capacities and for different transportation cost functions. The model we study is a generalization of the traditional single-item economic lot-sizing model, adding stationary production capacities at the manufacturer, as well as multiple interm...