In recent years, there has been an increasing adoption of returns policies in the coordination of the supply chain, where market demand is always assumed to be satisfied by manufacturing or by ordering from suppliers. However, many industries face the important decision of how to balance their inventory level. This problem has long been studied in financial institutions such as banks. This stud...

In this paper, we construct and analyze inventory and investment in quality im­ provement policies under return on investment (ROI) maximization. In our model, the level of quality is represented by the fraction of an order quantity meeting the quality requirements such £is product specifications. The key contributions of this paper are the establishment of an ROI model and characterization of ...

We consider a single-echelon inventory installation under the (s,S,T) periodic review ordering policy. Demand is stationary random and, when unsatisfied, is backordered. Under a standard cost structure, we seek to minimize total average cost in all three policy variables; namely, the reorder level s, the order-up-to level S and the review interval T. Considering time to be continuous, we first ...

An optimisation-based control framework that simultaneously determines the optimal inventory and product pricing policies is developed for multi-product, multi-echelon supply chain networks. The optimisation problem aims at adjusting the available manufacturing resources, product distribution, inventories and prices for the entire supply chain network to satisfy demand while maximising network ...

Bounds for the approximation error of optimal inventory policies are derived. The unknown distribution functions are approximated by normal distributions. The expectation of the errors are of order 00log(N) 1 2 ]:

Starting in the 1960s, a number of academic works have focused in serial and distributed multi-echelon structures and in both deterministic and stochastic environments. Clark and Scarf (1960, 1962) developed a seminal work in which they presented optimal policies for a serial multi-echelon system. Schwartz (1973) studied a deterministic model having one warehouse and N retailers and showed that...

This paper considers a multistage serial inventory system with Markov-modulated demand. Random demand arises at Stage 1, Stage 1 orders from Stage 2, etc., and Stage N orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock. The demand distribution in each period is determined by the current state of an exogenous Markov chain. Excess demand is backlogged. Linear holding costs are incurred at every...

INTRODUCTION Federal and state policies identify schools as a setting to prevent childhood obesity, but schools need better health-promoting strategies. The objective of this study was to evaluate interim progress in schools receiving hands-on training from the Healthy Schools Program, the nation's largest school-based program aimed at preventing childhood obesity. The 4-year program targets sc...