M any firms face environments with long manufacturing leadtimes, great product variety, and uncertain, nonstationary demand. A challenge is how to plan production and inventories to provide the best customer service at the least cost. In this paper, we first describe an application at Teradyne in which we implemented an inventory hedge to protect against cyclic demand variability. Based on this...

We address the inventory planning problem in process networks under uncertainty through stochastic programming models. The scope of inventory planning requires the formulation of multiperiod models to represent the time-varying conditions of industrial process, but the multistage stochastic programming formulations are often too large to solve. We propose a policy-based approximation of the mul...

We use the concept of time-consistent coherent risk measure to study a risk-averse firm’s inventory and price control activities. The model calls for worst-case analysis over a convex set of demand-distribution scenarios in every period. Structural characterization for an optimal inventory policy reminiscent of the risk-neutral counterpart is easy to achieve. More interestingly, mild monotone p...

We study a multicomponent, multiproduct production and inventory system in which individual components are made to stock but final products are assembled to customer orders. Each component is produced by an independent production facility with finite capacity, and the component inventory is controlled by an independent base-stock policy. For any given base-stock policy, we derive the key perfor...

We consider an inventory-production system where items deteriorate at a constant rate. The objective is to develop an optimal production policy that minimizes the cost associated with inventory and production rate. The inventory problem is first modeled as a linear optimal control problem. Then linear quadratic regulator (LQR) technique is applied to the control problem in order to determine th...

A multi-item model of a production-inventory system incorporating deterioration, shortages and capacity/budge constraints is considered. An optimal control policy for the model is developed using linear quadratic (LQ) theory for the case of deterministic demands. The problem of controlling large-scale production-inventory facilities is also considered, and the interaction prediction method is u...

In this paper, we develop approximations that yield insight into the joint optimization of capacity and inventory, and how the optimal inventory policy varies with capacity investment in a single-product, single-station, make-to-stock manufacturing system in which inventory is managed through a base-stock policy. We allow for a correlated demand stream as we analyze our models in an asymptotic ...

The control of a stochastic manufacturing system that executes capital asset repairs and remanufacturing in an integrated system is examined. The remanufacturing resources respond to planned returns of worn-out equipments at the end of their expected life and unplanned returns triggered by major equipment failures. Remanufacturing operations for planned demand can be executed at different rates...

A potential retail operations strategy is to have a ‘‘dense’’ store. That is, a store that combines high product variety with a small footprint. Retail management desires smaller stores to provide the strategic benefits of convenience and speed to customers, but desires larger stores to provide high product variety. Noting the benefits of smaller, more numerous stores, several retailers well kn...

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...