We consider a serial inventory system with N stages. The material flows from an outside supplier to stage N, then to stage N0 1, etc., and finally to stage 1 where random customer demand arises. Each stage replenishes a stage-specific inventory position according to a stagespecific reorder point/order quantity policy. Two variations of this policy are considered. One is based on echelon stock, ...

This paper considers a one-warehouse multi-retailer inventory system that faces discrete stochastic demand of the customers. Under the so-called balance assumption (also known as the allocation assumption), base stock policies are optimal. Our main contribution is to show that the optimal base stock levels satisfy newsvendor characterizations, which are in terms of inequalities, and to extend t...

We consider a two-echelon inventory system where the exogenous demands occur only at the retailer locations, and the demand rates are functions of an underlying continuoustime Markov chain. This underlying process may represent, for example, general economic conditions, the number of active users in the system, etcetera. Each retailer location follows a base-stock policy that is independent of ...

To control a production-inventory system, a manager has to consider the variability in demand as well as variability in her production process. Both types of variability corrupt system performance and by alleviating either of them, the manager can improve the performance of the system. There has been a recent trend towards investing in better information systems to provide better advance demand...

We study a multicomponent, multiproduct production and inventory system in which individual components are made to stock but final products are assembled to customer orders. Each component is produced by an independent production facility with finite capacity, and the component inventory is controlled by an independent base-stock policy. For any given base-stock policy, we derive the key perfor...

Managing spare parts inventories is a challenging task and can benefit considerably from any information on the failure rate of the parts. It has often been considered in the stock control literature that parts' failures are only random, caused by external events which results in the assumption of constant failure rate and therefore the consideration of the Poisson process to represent spare pa...

We study a single-item r q inventory system, where r is the reorder point and q is the order quantity. The demand is a compound-Poisson process. We investigate the behavior of the optimal policy parameters and the long-run average cost of the system in response to stochastically shorter or less-variable lead times. We show that although some of the properties of the base-stock system can be ext...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product whose demand distribution in each period is determined both by whether or not a sale price is offered in the current period, and the number of periods since the last time the sale price was offered. We show that optimal inventory ordering policy is a state dependent base stock policy; however, the optimal pricing p...

We consider an assemble-to-order (ATO) system with multiple products, multiple components which may be demanded in different quantities by different products, possible batch ordering of components, random lead times, and lost sales. We model the system as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process under the average cost criterion. A control policy specifies when a batch of components should be...

All intensively studied and widely applied inventory control policies satisfy demand in accordance with the First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) rule, whether this demand is in backorder or not. Interestingly, this rule is sub-optimal when the fill-rate is constrained or when the backorder cost structure includes fixed costs per backorder and costs per backorder per unit time. In this paper we study ...