This article addresses the development of an integrated supplier selection and inventory control problems in supply chain management by developing a mathematical model for a multi-echelon system. In particular, a buyer firm that consists of one warehouse and N identical retailers wants to procure a product from a group of potential suppliers, which may require different price, ordering cost, le...

Product perishability is a major concern of certain industrial sectors, especially the agro-food industry. This paper investigates the effect of product perishability and retailers’ stockout policy on system total cost, net profit, service level, and average inventory level in a two-echelon inventory–distribution system, and develops an approximate inventory model to these system performance me...

In this paper we consider a two-echelon supply chain system consisting of a supplier and a retailer. The supplier has an inventory system and a service unit to process the orders received from the retailer. Demands arrive to the retailer according to a Poisson process. Both supplier and retailer apply one-for-one ordering policy. The supplier’s lead time and the service time of his service unit...

In multi-echelon inventory systems the performance of a given node is affected by events that occur at many other nodes and in many other time periods. For example, a supply disruption upstream will have an effect on downstream, customer-facing nodes several periods later as the disruption "cascades" through the system. There is very little research on stock-out prediction in single-echelon sys...

We study the optimal integrated production/inventory policy in a two-echelon supply chain with one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer produces items in her production facility and keeps the Þnished goods in inventory. The manufacturer’s production facility deteriorates with usage and is subject to failure. Under the assumption that the manufacturer has on-line access to the retaile...

To cope with current turbulent market demands, more robust inventory policies are needed for distribution networks, to lower the inventory cost as well as maintain high responsiveness. This paper analyzes the inventory policies in the context of complex multiechelon distribution networks and proposes an optimization and simulation integrating approach to robust inventory policies selection for ...

We consider a multi-item two-echelon inventory system in which the central warehouse operates under a (Q,R) policy, and each local warehouse implements (S − 1, S) policy. The objective is to find the policy parameters minimizing expected system-wide inventory holding and fixed ordering costs subject to an aggregate mean response time constraint at each facility. We propose a Lagrangian heuristi...