This paper considers a concurrent pricing and inventory control problem in a stochastic and periodic review setting. Demand in a period is random and depends on the posted price. Other than holding and backlogging costs, the system incurs stock-replenishment costs that consist of both variable and fixed components. At the beginning of each period, a simultaneous decision has to be made on stock...

We consider a distribution problem in which a product has to be shipped from a supplier to several retailers over a given time horizon. Each retailer defines a maximum inventory level. The supplier monitors the inventory of each retailer and determines its replenishment policy, guaranteeing that no stockout occurs at the retailer (Vendor Managed Inventory policy). Every time a retailer is visit...

Commodity storage-assets can be either physical storage-facilities, or contracts guaranteeing their use. Merchants employ them to support their commodity-trading activities in wholesale markets, which are characterized by notoriously volatile prices. Managing a storage asset requires determining an inventory-management policy, which, given a realization of the commodity price, consists of choos...

Generally, the derivation of an inventory policy requires the knowledge of the underlying demand distribution. Unfortunately, in many settings such as retail, demand is not completely observable in a direct way or inventory records may be inaccurate. A variety of factors, including the potential inaccuracy of inventory records, motivate retailers to seek replenishment policies with a fixed orde...

When a manufacturer places repeated orders with a supplier to meet changing production requirements, he faces the challenge of finding the right balance between holding costs and the operational costs involved in adjusting the shipment sizes. We consider an inventory whose content fluctuates as a Brownian motion in the absence of control. At any moment, a controller can adjust the inventory lev...

The inventory problem associated with trade credit is a popular topic in which interest income and interest payments are important issues. Most studies related to trade credit assume that the interest rate is both fixed and predetermined. However, in the real market, many factors such as financial policy, monetary policy and inflation, may affect the interest rate. Moreover, within the environm...

Inventory policies for joint remanufacturing and manufacturing have recently received much attention. Most efforts, though, were related to (optimal) policy structures and numerical optimization, rather than closed form expressions for calculating near optimal policy parameters. The focus of this paper is on the latter. We analyze an inventory system with unit product returns and demands where ...

We develop the first approximation algorithms with worst-case performance guarantees for periodic-review perishable inventory systems with general product lifetime, for both backlogging and lost-sales models. The demand process can be non-stationary and correlated over time, capturing such features as demand seasonality and forecast updates. The optimal control policy for such systems is notori...

Considering the supply chain consists of one supplier and two retailers, we construct the system’s dynamic models which face stochastic demand in the case of non-lateral transshipment (NLT), unidirectional lateral transshipment (ULT) and bidirectional lateral transshipment (BLT). Numerical example simulation experiments of these models were run on Venple. We adopt customer demand satisfaction r...

In many industries, customers are offered free shipping whenever an order placed exceeds a minimum quantity specified by suppliers. This allows the suppliers to achieve economies of scale in terms of production and distribution by encouraging customers to place large orders. In this paper, we consider the optimal policy of a retailer who operates a single-product inventory system under periodic...