This paper is concerned with the coordination of inventory control in divergent multiechelon inventory systems under periodic review and decentralized control. All the installations track echelon inventories. Under decentralized control the installations will decide upon replenishment policies that minimize their individual inventory costs. In general these policies do not coincide with the opt...

We analyze a multistage inventory system with limited production capacity facing stochastic demands. Each node follows a periodic-review base-stock policy for echelon inventory: in each period, each node attempts to produce enough material to restore cumulative downstream inventory to a fixed target level. We develop approximations to the key measures of interest (average inventories, average b...

We consider a multi-location inventory system where inventory choices at each location are centrally coordinated. Lateral Transshipments are allowed as recourse actions within the same echelon in the inventory system to reduce costs and improve service level. However this transshipment process usually causes undesirable lead times. In this paper, we propose a multiobjective model of the multi-l...

We address multi-item inventory systems with random and seasonally fluctuating, and possibly correlated, demands. The items are produced in two stages, each with its own lead-time; in the first stage a common intermediate product is manufactured. The production volumes in the first stage are bounded by given capacity limits. We develop an accurate lower bound and close-to-optimal heuristic stra...

Product perishability is a major concern of certain industrial sectors, especially the agro-food industry. This paper investigates the effect of product perishability and retailers’ stockout policy on system total cost, net profit, service level, and average inventory level in a two-echelon inventory–distribution system, and develops an approximate inventory model to these system performance me...

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....

JDMS, Volume 2, Issue 2, April 2005 Pages 87–100 © 2005 The Society for Modeling and Simulation International Traditional multi-echelon inventory and readiness-based models have not fully examined the ability of effective transportation utilization to reduce cost, delay times, and improve readiness in the overall military logistics network. In this paper, we develop a simulation-based methodolo...