We investigate optimal system design in a multi-location system in which supply is subject to disruptions. We examine the expected costs and cost variances of the system in both a centralized and a decentralized inventory system. We show that, when demand is deterministic and supply may be disrupted, using a decentralized inventory design reduces cost variance through the risk diversification e...

With the high accident rate of civil aviation, medical resource inventory becomes more important for emergency management at the airport. Meanwhile, medical products usually are time-sensitive and short lifetime. Moreover, we find that the optimal medical resource inventory depends on multiple factors such as different risk preferences, the material shelf life and so on. Thus, it becomes very c...

Inspired by the retail industry, we consider a stochastic inventory routing problem where retailers are replenished from central warehouse using time-based shipment consolidation policy. Such dispatching policy, facing demand repetitively at fixed times, is essential in practice. It allows for easy incorporation with dependent up- and downstream planning problems such as personal staffing opera...

In this paper, we present a unified approach to study a class of cooperative games arising from inventory centralization. The optimization problems corresponding to the inventory games are formulated as stochastic programs. We observe that the strong duality of stochastic linear programming not only directly leads to a series of recent results concerning the non-emptiness of the cores of such g...

This paper presents a mathematical model for an inventory control system in which customers’ demands and suppliers’ service time are considered as stochastic parameters. The proposed problem is solved through queuing theory for a single item. In this case, transitional probabilities are calculated in steady state. Afterward, the model is extended to the case of multi-item inventory systems. The...

this paper aims to evaluate inventory cost of a two-echelon serial supply chain system under vendor managed inventory program with stochastic demand, and examine the effect of environmental factors on the cost of overall system. for this purpose, we consider a two-echelon serial supply chain with a manufacturer and a retailer. under vendor managed inventory program, the decision on inventory le...

this paper presents a new formulation for warehouse inventory management in a stochastic situation. the primary source of this formulation is derived from fp model, which has been proposed by fletcher and ponnambalam for reservoir management. the new proposed mathematical model is based on the first and the second moments of storage as a stochastic variable. using this model, the expected value...

We consider a single-location inventory system with periodic review and stochastic demand. It places replenishment orders to raise the inventory position—that is, inventory on hand plus inventory in transit—to exactly S at the beginning of every period. The lead time associated with each of these orders is random. However, the lead-time process is such that these orders do not cross. Demand tha...