This paper deals with the question of optimal inventory sizes in a compétitive environment in which the demand for a product at a vendor dépends on the inventory level of the product at that vendor relative to the inventories of the same product held by other competing vendors. The total demand for the product at all vendors is assumed to be fixed. This question is examined for two different re...

Traditional inventory models focus on risk neutral decision makers, i.e., characterizing replenishment strategies that maximize expected total profit, or equivalently, minimize expected total cost over a planning horizon. In this paper, we propose a general framework for incorporating risk aversion in multi-period inventory models as well as multi-period models that coordinate inventory and pri...

This paper considers the basic economic order quantity (EOQ) model when all parameters, such as the demand rate, the ordering cost, and the inventory holding cost, are uncertain, and furthermore, their probability information is also unknown. To address the uncertainty, we adopt a robustness-based approach. In this approach, each unknown parameter is described as a continuous value restricted t...

Traditional inventory models focus on risk-neutral decision makers, i.e., characterizing replenishment strategies that maximize expected total profit, or equivalently, minimize expected total cost over a planning horizon. In this paper, we propose a framework for incorporating risk aversion in multi-period inventory models as well as multi-period models that coordinate inventory and pricing str...

Inventory control is a crucial activity for many companies. Given the recent advances in information technology, there have never been greater opportunities for coordinated inventory control across supply chain facilities. But how do we design efficient control methods and policies that take advantage of the detailed information that is now becoming available? This doctoral thesis investigates ...

– This paper derives a good approach to approximating the expected inventory level per unit time for the continuous review perishable inventory system. Three existing approximation approaches are examined and compared with the proposed approach. Three stockout cases, including the full backorder, the partial backorder, and the full lost sales cases, which customers or material users generally u...

Inventory control is important in supply chain management. A great deal of research efforts have been devoted to it over a few decades. Previous researches always assume that the lead time is an exogenously parameter, and the unmet demand is backordered. However, these assumptions may not suit to the real environment. In this paper, a mathematical model regarding inventory control is set up for...

In planning and scheduling of production systems manufacturers have two main strategies for responding to uncertainty: they build inventory to hedge against periods in which the production capacity is not suucient to satisfy demand, or they temporarily increase the production capacity. We consider the problem of minimizing the long-run average cost of holding inventory and/or purchasing extra c...

We consider a two-stage production-inventory system. Each stage is made of an exponential production server and an output inventory. The downstream inventory faces a Poisson demand and each inventory receives product returns that can be either accepted or rejected. The objective is to find a production/admission policy minimizing the expected discounted costs over an infinite horizon. We consid...

This paper investigates the impacts inventory shortage policies have on transportation costs in base-stock distribution systems under uncertain demand. The model proposed demonstrates how backlogging arrangements can serve to decrease the variability of transportation capacity requirements, and hence the magnitude of transportation costs, when compared with policies that expedite demand shortag...