9. Queues, storage and inventories

Inventories, Water Storage and Queues

Inventories with Multiple Supply Sources and Networks of Queues with Overflow Bypasses

Consider an inventory system with multiple supply sources and Poisson demand. The replenishment leadtimes from each source are stochastic, representing congestion and disruption. We develop performance evaluation and optimization tools for a family of reasonable order policies. These policies take into account real-time supply information, which can be obtained through tracking technologies suc...

Using Fluid Queues to Model Energy Storage and Distribution

Energy storage and distribution is an increasingly important problem as renewable (and generally unreliable) energy sources supply more of our power needs. In this extended abstract we consider a simple network of energy suppliers, consumers and buffers modelled as fluid queues. Analytical evaluation of networks of fluid queues is hard as even tandem networks do no have a product form solution....

Labor Hoarding and Inventories

Labor hoarding is a widely believed empirical behavior of …rms and a prominent explanation for procyclical labor productivity. Conventional wisdom attributes labor hoarding to labor adjustment costs. This paper argues that the conventional wisdom is inadequate for understanding labor hoarding because it ignores the role of inventories. Since idle labor can be used to produce inventories, why do...

Inventories and the automobile market

This paper studies the within-model-year pricing, production, and inventory management of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices, we document that, for the typical vehicle, prices fall over the model year at a 9.0 percent annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump shaped. To explain these time series, we formulate an industry model for new automob...