We investigate the situation where a customer experiencing an inventory stockout at a retailer potentially leaves the firm’s market. In classical inventory theory, a unit stockout penalty cost has been used as a surrogate to mimic the economic effect of such a departure; in this study we explicitly represent this aspect of consumer behavior, incorporating the diminishing effect of the consumers...

We consider periodic review inventory control problems in directed networks, primary examples of which are distribution systems and assembly systems. External demand could occur at each node. When inventory is insufficient to meet requirements at a node, a portion of this demand is backordered and the remaining is lost. External demands, as well as lead times for inventory purchase, assembly, a...

Sustainability has become a major issue in most economies, causing many leading companies to focus on product recovery and reverse logistics. This research is focused on product recovery, and in particular on production control and inventory management in the remanufacturing context. We study a remanufacturing facility that receives a stream of returned products according to a Poisson process. ...

The military is one of the largest pharmaceutical distributors in the country. In order to minimize the amount of inventory held, and hence warehousing and expired drug costs, data mining techniques can be applied to old transaction records to predict future needs. One powerful method of data mining is the use of neural networks. Neural networks have the ability to learn inventory needs based o...

We formulate and solve a single-item joint pricing and master planning optimization problem with capacity and inventory constrains. The objective is to maximize profits over a discretetime multiperiod horizon. The solution process consists of two steps. First, we solve the singleperiod problem exactly. Second, using the exact solution of the single-period problem, we solve the multiperiod probl...

Problem statement: Today, inventory management is considered to be an important field in Supply chain management. Once the efficient and effective management of inventory is carried out throughout the supply chain, service provided to the customer ultimately gets enhanced. Hence, to ensure minimal cost for the supply chain, the determination of the level of inventory to be held at various level...

We consider an inventory control problem where it is possible to collect some imperfect information on future demand. We refer to such information as imperfect Advance Demand Information (ADI), which may occur in different forms of applications. A simple example is a company that uses sales representatives to market its products, in which case the collection of sales representatives’ informatio...

A well-studied problem in the literature on airline revenue (or yield) management is the optimal allocation of seat inventory among fare classes given a demand distribution for each class. In practice, the seat allocation decisions of one airline affect the passenger demands for seats on other airlines. In this paper we examine the seat inventory control problem under both horizontal competitio...

We introduce a single location periodic review inventory control problem with lost sales and fractional lead times. We model the optimal inventory control problem as a stochastic dynamic program and analyze properties of the objective function as well as the optimal policy. We present upper and lower bounds on the optimal policy. These bounds can readily be used in easily computable heuristics....

We study a finite-horizon lost-sales inventory model. The demand distribution is unknown and is dynamically updated based on the previous sales data in a Bayesian fashion. We derive a samplepath representation of the first order optimality condition, which characterizes the key tradeoff of the problem. The expression allows us to see why the computation of the optimal policy is difficult and wh...