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 ...

We address the optimal design of a multi-echelon supply chain and the associated inventory systems in the presence of uncertain customer demands. By using the guaranteed service approach to model the multi-echelon stochastic inventory system, we develop an optimization model for simultaneously optimizing the transportation, inventory and network structure of a multi-echelon supply chain. We for...

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 stand...

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...

We study the optimal integrated production/inventory policy in a two-echelon supply chain with one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer produces items in her production facility and keeps the Þnished goods in inventory. The manufacturer’s production facility deteriorates with usage and is subject to failure. Under the assumption that the manufacturer has on-line access to the retaile...