Copyright: © 2016 INFORMS Abstract. We propose and analyze robust optimization models of an inventory management problem, where cumulative purchase, inventory, and shortage costs over n periods are minimized for correlated nonidentically distributed demand. We assume that the means and covariance matrix of stochastic demand are known; the distributions are not needed. We derive closed-form orde...

In some retail contexts, higher inventories not only improve service levels, but also stimulate demand by serving as a promotional tool (e.g., by increasing product visibility). Motivated by a building-products retailer’s practice of stocking large quantities of products to stimulate demand, we study inventory management policies when demand is uncertain but increases with stocking quantity. Fo...

The development of control-oriented decision policies for inventory management in supply chains has received considerable interest in recent years, and demand modeling to supply forecasts for these policies is an important component of an effective solution to this problem. Drawing from the problem of control-relevant identification, we present an approach for demand modeling based on data that...

In a VMI service, a central production center (i.e. the vendor) can control the inventory of each retailer according to the optimization of the costs due both to the overfilling/stock-out of the inventories and to the travels required for the deliveries. In this work, an original mathematical programming approach has been formulated and implemented in order to show that under specific but commo...

This paper describes a model predictive control strategy to tackle the inventory control problem in Supply Chains. The problem is formulated as a receding-horizon optimization problem and the market demand is considered an external unknown disturbance. The behaviour of the Supply Chain is modelled by discrete time difference equations, both the control variables and the output variables are con...

Inventory management involves trade-offs between conflicting objectives such as cost minimization and service level maximization. The trade-off analysis of cycle stock investment and workload, so called the exchange curve, possibly dates back to several decades ago. These analyses seldom formulated inventory trade-offs as a multi-objective optimization problem and their solution procedures were...