We propose a robust optimization approach to address a multi-period, inventory control problem under ambiguous demands, that is, only limited information of the demand distributions such as mean, support and some measures of deviations. Our framework extends to correlated demands and is developed around a factor-based model, which has the ability to incorporate business factors as well as time ...

The Tauber Manufacturing Institute (TMI) is a partnership between the engineering and business schools at the University of Michigan. In the summer of 1999, a TMI team spent 14 weeks at Dell Inc. in Austin, Texas, and developed an inventory model to identify inventory drivers and quantify target levels for inventory in the final stage of Dell’s supply chain, the revolvers or supplier logistics ...

In a typical inventory planning problem with a life cycle of only one planning period we incur the cost of production per unit produced, profit per unit sold, loss per unit not sold, and lost revenue per unit ordered but not matched due to the lack of availability. The goal is to find the inventory level that maximizes the expected net profit. Textbooks often use the newsboy problem to illustra...

This study is motivated by a process-reengineering problem in PC manufacturing, i.e., to move from a build-to-stock operation that is centered around end-product (machine type model) inventory, towards a configure-to-order (CTO) operation that eliminates end-product inventory — in fact, CTO has made irrelevant the whole notion of pre-configured machine types — and focuses instead on maintaining...

This research applied Selective Regeneration Particle Swarm Optimization (SRPSO) for two-stage supply chain inventory classification problems. In SRPSO, In order to increase the efficiency, suggestion on parameter settings is made and a mechanism is designed to prevent particles fall into the local optimal. This research is assumed that an inventory classification is performed to properly categ...

This paper studies a distribution system consisting of multiple retail locations with transshipment operations among the retailers. Due to the difficulty in computing the optimal solution imposed by the transshipment operations and in estimating shortage cost from a practical perspective, we propose a robust optimization framework for analyzing the impact of transshipment operations on such a d...

A important issue in the management of supply chains and manufacturing systems is to control inventory costs at different locations throughout the system while satisfying an end-customer service-level requirement. The challenge involved is to solve a nonlinear constrained optimization problem that captures the key dynamics of a complex production-inventory system. In this paper, we first develo...

Since the past century, when the first economic order quantity (EOQ) formula was introduced, many researchers have tried to develop and extend the first version to adapt with real world situations. One of these extensions is considering the inventory system in imprecise business and industrial environment. To do so, fuzzy set theory has fruitfully been integrated with EOQ models. This combinati...

The combined operation of distribution and inventory control achieved through a vendor-managed inventory strategy creates a synergetic interaction which benefits supplier and customers. Inventory-Routing Problems (IRPs) arise when inventory and routing decisions must be taken simultaneously, which yields a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. While most IRP research deals with a single...

Motivated by practices in modern supply chains, we consider capacity-inventory joint management for a make-to-stock manufacturing system operating under a base stock policy. The production facility is modeled as multiple servers operating in parallel. The number of servers corresponds to the capacity decision and the base stock level is the inventory decision. The main problem which we consider...