In this paper, we examine a discrete-time, periodic-review production environment that assembles several hundred items and that possesses limited, perhaps random production capacity. The demand for a large subset of these items is highly erratic and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict accurately. Consequently, a coordinated production-inventory strategy, such as the No B/C Strate...

In this paper, we consider an inventory problem with two demand classes having different priorities. The appropriate policy of rationing the available stock, i.e. reserving some stock for meeting prospective future demand of preferred customers at the expense of deliberately losing some of the currently materialized demand of lower demand class(es), relies on the estimation of the future demand...

Customers and downstream supply chain partners often place, or can be induced to place, orders in advance of future requirements. We show how to optimally incorporate advance demand information into periodic-review, multiechelon, inventory systems in series. While the state space for series systems appears to be formidably large, we decompose the problem across locations, as in Clark and Scarf ...

This paper considers a problem of multi-period supply portfolio selection and execution with demand information updates. A supply portfolio specifies a buyer’s decision on selecting sourcing mix from among a group of suppliers. We develop a framework for optimal supply portfolio selection and execution. Further, we demonstrate that the optimal portfolio selection follows a base-stock policy and...

We study an assemble-to-order system with stochastic leadtimes for component replenishment. There are multiple product types, of which orders arrive at the system following batch Poisson processes. Base-stock policies are used to control component inventories. We analyze the system as a set of queues driven by a common, multiclass batch Poisson input, and derive the joint queue-length distribut...

We consider an optimization problem for a multiclass queueing model of a decentralized production-distribution system: A single server can produce a variety of products, and completed units pass through an infinite server delay node on their way to a warehouse inventory. Each product has its own warehouse, demand for each product is satisfied by its associated inventory, and unsatisfied demand ...

In this paper, we consider an adaptive base-stock policy for a single-item inventory system, where the demand process is nonstationary. In particular, the demand process is an integrated moving average process of order (0, 1, 1), for which an exponential-weighted moving average provides the optimal forecast. For the assumed control policy we characterize the inventory random variable and use th...

W consider the optimal production and inventory control of an assemble-to-order system with m components, one end-product, and n customer classes. A control policy specifies when to produce each component and, whenever an order is placed, whether or not to satisfy it from on-hand inventory. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process and characterize the structure of an optimal policy...