Starting in the 1960s, a number of academic works have focused in serial and distributed multi-echelon structures and in both deterministic and stochastic environments. Clark and Scarf (1960, 1962) developed a seminal work in which they presented optimal policies for a serial multi-echelon system. Schwartz (1973) studied a deterministic model having one warehouse and N retailers and showed that...

An optimisation-based control framework that simultaneously determines the optimal inventory and product pricing policies is developed for multi-product, multi-echelon supply chain networks. The optimisation problem aims at adjusting the available manufacturing resources, product distribution, inventories and prices for the entire supply chain network to satisfy demand while maximising network ...

In this paper, for effective multi-echelon supply chains under stochastic and fuzzy environments, an inventory management framework and deterministic/stochastic-neuro-fuzzy cost models within the context of this framework are structured. Then, a numerical application in a three-echelon tree-structure chain is presented to show the applicability and performance of proposed framework. It can be s...

The paper analyses non-cooperative behaviour in a two-echelon decentralized supply chain, composed of one supplier and n retailers. For sufficient supply from the supplier, we build the approximate decision model of their base stock level, in which the suppliers reactions are not considered, and its non-cooperative behaviour is obtained. For insufficient supply from the supplier, much more comp...

We study an infinite-horizon, N -stage, serial production/inventory system with two transportation modes between stages: regular shipping and expedited shipping. The optimal inventory policy for this system is a top–down echelon base-stock policy, which can be computed through minimizing 2N nested convex functions recursively (Lawson and Porteus, Oper Res 48 (2000), 878–893). In this article, w...

  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 ...

We consider the classic continuous-review N stage serial inventory system with a homogeneous Poisson demand arrival process at the most downstream stage (Stage 1). Any shipment to each stage, regardless of its size, incurs a positive fixed setup cost and takes a positive constant lead time. The optimal policy for this system under the long-run average cost criterion is unknown. Finding a good w...

We consider the classic N -stage serial supply systems with linear costs and stationary random demands. There are deterministic transportation leadtimes between stages, and unsatisfied demands are backlogged. The optimal inventory policy for this system is known to be an echelon base-stock policy, which can be computed through minimizing N nested convex functions recursively. To identify the ke...

In many multi-echelon inventory systems, the lead times are random variables. A common and reasonable assumption in most models is that replenishment orders do not cross, which implies that successive lead times are correlated. However, the process that generates such lead times is usually not well defined, which is especially a problem for simulation modeling. In this paper, we use results fro...