Optimal Policies for a Multi-Echelon Inventory Problem

University. One of my reasons for choosing RAND rather than a more conventional academic appointment was my desire to be involved in applied rather than abstract mathematics. I could not have selected a better location to achieve this particular goal. George Dantzig had arrived recently and was in the process of applying linear programming techniques to a growing body of basic problems. Richard Bellman was convinced that all optimization problems with a dynamic structure (and many others) could be formulated fruitfully, and solved, as dynamic programs. Ray Fulkerson and Lester Ford were working on network flow problems, a topic which became the