Devising manufacturing/distribution strategies for supply chains and determining their parameter values have been challenging problems. Linking production management to stock keeping processes improves the planning of the supply chain activities, including material management, culminating in improved customer service levels. In this study, we investigate a multi-echelon supply chain consisting ...

JDMS, Volume 2, Issue 2, April 2005 Pages 87–100 © 2005 The Society for Modeling and Simulation International Traditional multi-echelon inventory and readiness-based models have not fully examined the ability of effective transportation utilization to reduce cost, delay times, and improve readiness in the overall military logistics network. In this paper, we develop a simulation-based methodolo...

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 consider a two-echelon supply chain with two retailers and one supplier. The retailers are supplied by the supplier who makes all the decisions and bears all the inventory risk. Throughout this paper, we consider two different inventory systems: a reserved inventory system and a pooled inventory system. With the reserved inventory system, the supplier keeps separate inventories for each ret...

Nowadays, Companies have to deal with an uncertain demand which is more difficult to handle when it has a non-stationary pattern. Simultaneous decrease of customer service and increase of stock costs are the most significant effects of such demand uncertainty. To deal with this issue, inventory optimization models must be adapted to cover a multi-echelon network structure and to consider altern...

We study a class of two echelon, serial systems with identical ordering capacities or limits for both echelons. For the case where the lead time to the upstream echelon is one period, the optimality of state-dependent, modified echelon base-stock policies is proved using a decomposition approach. For the case where the upstream lead time is two periods, we introduce a new class of policies call...

This paper reviews inventory models with multiple supply options and discusses their contribution to supply chain management. After discussing strategic aspects of supplier competition and the role of operational flexibility in global sourcing, inventory models which use several suppliers in order to avoid or reduce the effects of shortage situations are outlined. Further, related inventory pro...

This paper considers an inventory system responsible for repairable equipments located at several operational sites, each in different area. When a failure occurs at the operational site, spare parts are required. We analyze a multiple-supplier inventory system that includes an internal repair shop that offers several modes of repair with different repair times and an external supplier of spare...