Sustainability throughout supply chains is gaining more importance and re-planning inventory operations can help companies curb emissions. In this study, we present two bi-objective integrated continuous review inventory control and transportation models with less-than-truckload and truckload carriers. Solution methods to approximate the Pareto Frontiers are proposed. Numerical studies illustra...

O n Jan. 1, the University of Minnesota launched a major overhaul of its institutional review boards (IRBs) with the goal of increasing efficiency, quality, and — most importantly for many IRB critics — the speed with which it reviews new clinical trial protocols. The reforms represent one approach to fi xing the problems that have been plaguing IRBs everywhere for more than a decade. Charged w...

Traditional approaches in inventory control first estimate the demand distribution among a predefined family of distributions based on data fitting of historical demand observations, and then optimize the inventory control using the estimated distributions. These approaches often lead to fragile solutions whenever the preselected family of distributions was inadequate. In this work we propose a...

This study analyzes an inventory control problem of a company in stochastic demand environment under carbon emissions regulations. In particular, a continuous review inventory model with multiple suppliers is investigated under carbon taxing and carbon trading regulations. We analyze and compare the optimal (Q,R) policies with order splitting under two ordering policies: sequential ordering and...

We study the optimal policy for a serial inventory system under periodic review when excess demand at the retailer (i.e., the most downstream stage) is lost. We focus on “high service level environments” (i.e., systems where the cost of a lost sale is high compared to inventory holding costs). These environments are typical of products whose margins are high relative to their holding costs. Whe...

The modern business environment is highly unpredictable. An anticipation approach in a real case study is presented to cope with such instability and minimize the total inventory cost without stock-outs occurring and inventory capacity being exceeded. The anticipation concept is performed using simulation models supported by inventory control algorithms on a selected sample of representative it...

This paper is concerned with near-optimal control of manufacturing systems consisting of two unreliable machines in tandem and having the objective of minimizing the total discounted cost of inventories/shortages over an innnite horizon. Asymptotic optimal feedback controls are constructed with respect to the rate of machine breakdown/repair as compared to the given discount rate. Performance o...

The global demand for consumer electronic products has been phenomenal in the last two decades. The negative environmental effects of the growing consumption of electronic hardware are most visible in the end-of-life (EOL) stage. Remanufacturing is a viable option in electronic waste management as it reduces e waste generation and increases reuse of equipment and components. Inventory control i...

We analyze an infinite horizon, single product, periodic review model in which pricing and production/inventory decisions are made simultaneously. Demands in different periods are identically distributed random variables that are independent of each other and their distributions depend on the product price. Pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortage...

Total spending on drugs in Canada was forecasted, by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), to have reached $26.9 billion in 2007, an increase of 7.2% over the previous year 1 . Drug expenses were forecasted to represent 16.8% of total healthcare spending in 2007. Drug expenditure growth was lower in 2007 than the 11% increase reported in 2005 and the 9.1% increase in 2003. CIHI ...