Inventory control in presence of multiple sourcing

Supply chain management is an integrative approach for planning and control of materials and information flows with suppliers and customers as well as between different functions within a company. One particularly important element in supply chain management is the management of inventories. This field has received considerable attention during the last years. Nevertheless, most quantitative analysis on supply chain management issues is dominated by the framework of multi-echelon serial systems or distribution systems where relationships between a single vendor and a single buyer or a single vendor and several buyers are considered. The situation of multiple suppliers and a single/multiple buyers has received less attention. (Minner, 2003)