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...

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...

s-This paper further extends the existing cost model for a fixed-life perishable product in a two-echelon inventory problem into the net profit model. The extended model is subsequently evaluated by comparing its results with those obtained from OptQuest, a commercial simulationoptimization package. Within a limited but reasonable time, the comparative results do not show a significant improvem...

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 ...

This paper considers a two-echelon capacitated supply chain with two non-identical retailers and information sharing. We characterize the optimal inventory policies. We also study the benefits of the optimal stock rationing policy over the first come first served (FCFS) and the modified echelon-stock rationing (MESR) policies. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

inventory control is one of the most important issues in supply chain management. in this paper, a three-echelon production, distribution, inventory system composed of one producer, a set of wholesalers and retailers is considered. costumers' demands can be approximated by a normal distribution and the inventory policy is a kind of continuous review (r, q). in this paper, a model based on ...

We consider the problem of minimizing the overall cost of a supply chain, over a possibility long horizon, under demand uncertainly which is known only crudely. Under such circumstances, the method of choice is Robust Optimization, in particular the Affinely Adjustable Robust Counterpart (AARC) method which leads to tractable deterministic optimization problems. The latter is due to a recent re...

Stochastic inventory control in multi-echelon systems poses hard problems in optimisation under uncertainty. Stochastic programming can solve small instances optimally, and approximately solve large instances via scenario reduction techniques, but it cannot handle arbitrary nonlinear constraints or other nonstandard features. Simulation optimisation is an alternative approach that has recently ...

Large multi-echelon inventory systems usually consist of hundreds of thousands of stock keep units (SKU). Calculating inventory policies for each product is a computational burden that necessitates the need for more efficient policy setting techniques that reduce computational time and increases managerial convenience. The main objective of our research is to investigate the effect of segmentat...