– All-unit order frequency discount • 94%-effective policy for a variable base period – Incremental order frequency discount • 94%-effective policy for a fixed base period • 98%-effective policy for a variable base period Introduction • A supply chain is a network of facilities that procure raw materials, transform them into intermediate goods and then final products, and deliver the products t...

C often face nonstationary demand due to product life cycles and seasonality, and nonstationary demand complicates supply chain managers’ inventory decisions. This paper proposes a simple heuristic for determining stocking levels in a serial inventory system. Unlike the exact optimization algorithm, the heuristic generates a near-optimal solution by solving a series of independent single-stage ...

Multi-echelon inventory systems are one of the most important and attractive areas in modelling supply chain management so that several researches and studies have been done about. In this paper, the total cost function of a two-echelon inventory system with central warehouse and many identical retailers controlled by continuous review inventory policy is estimated. We have assumed the demand i...

⎯We consider a two-echelon supply chain with two retailers and one supplier. The retailers are supplied by the supplier who makes all the decisions and bears all the inventory risk. Throughout this paper, we consider two different inventory systems: a reserved inventory system and a pooled inventory system. With the reserved inventory system, the supplier keeps separate inventories for each ret...

On the basis of analyzing the shortages of present studies on multi-echelon inventory control, and considering some restrictions, this paper applies the joint replenishment strategy into the inventory system and builds a multi-product multi-echelon inventory control model. Then, an algorithm designed by Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used for solving the model. Finally, we respectively simulate the ...

An arborescent distribution system is a multi-level system in which each installation receives input from a unique immediate predecessor and supplies one or more immediate successors. In this paper, it is shown that a distribution system with an arborescent structure can also be modelled using an echelon stock concept where at any instant the total echelon holding cost is accumulated at the sam...

In this paper, we establish the convexity of important cost functions in a general class of multi-echelon inventory models. In particular, we first study an assembly system with a single finished product managed using an echelon order-up-to policy. We show that the shortage penalty cost over any horizon is jointly convex with respect to the base-stock levels and capacity levels. Our second resu...

The effective management of supply chains depends upon the ability of decision makers to control inventory while maintaining customer service at low cost. This paper examines an analytical model for the two-echelon one warehouse and multiple retailers system using (R, Q) inventory policies. A simulation model was developed to analyze the performance of the analytical model under conditions that...

The paper analyses non-cooperative behaviour in a two-echelon decentralized supply chain, composed of one supplier and n retailers. For sufficient supply from the supplier, we build the approximate decision model of their base stock level, in which the suppliers reactions are not considered, and its non-cooperative behaviour is obtained. For insufficient supply from the supplier, much more comp...

We study an infinite-horizon, N -stage, serial production/inventory system with two transportation modes between stages: regular shipping and expedited shipping. The optimal inventory policy for this system is a top–down echelon base-stock policy, which can be computed through minimizing 2N nested convex functions recursively (Lawson and Porteus, Oper Res 48 (2000), 878–893). In this article, w...