We consider a manufacturer introducing a new product into a distribution channel and examine what wholesale price should be charged. The setting in many ways is simple. The channel is abbreviated with the manufacturer selling directly to the retailer. The contract is also simple, merely a flat wholesale price. Demand is stochastic but independent and identically distributed in each period. Comp...

In this paper, we examine the effect of product variety on inventory costs in a production– inventory system with finite capacity where products are made to stock and share the same manufacturing facility. The facility incurs a setup time whenever it switches from producing one product type to another. The production facility has a finite production rate and stochastic production times. In orde...

This paper proposes a new motivation for information sharing in a decentralized channel consisting of a single manufacturer and two competing retailers. The manufacturer provides a common product to the retailers at the same wholesale price. Both retailers add their own values to the product and distribute it to consumers. Factors such as retail prices, values added to the product, and local ad...

We study multi-product and multi-item assemble-to-order systems under general assumptions on demand patterns and replenish leadtime distributions. We only assume that the demand process of each product being a renewal process, and the replenish leadtimes follow general distributions. Based upon techniques from renewal theory, we developed procedures for approximating key performance measures of...

recently, much attention has been given to stochastic demand due to uncertainty in the real -world. in the literature, decision-making models and suppliers' selection do not often consider inventory management as part of shopping problems. on the other hand, the environmental sustainability of a supply chain depends on the shopping strategy of the supply chain members. the supplier selection pl...

The life cycle of new products is becoming shorter and shorter in all markets. For electronic products, life cycles are measured in units of months, with six to twelve-month life cycles being common. Given these short product life-cycles, product demand is increasingly difficult to forecast. Furthermore, demand is never really stationary as the demand rate evolves over the life of the product. ...

Model predictive control (MPC) is presented as a robust, flexible decision framework for dynamically managing inventories and satisfying customer demand in demand networks. In this paper, a formulation and the benefits of an MPC-based, control-oriented tactical inventory management system meaningful to the semiconductor industry are presented via two significant examples. The translation of ava...

This article evaluates the premise of demand adherence to normal distribution in inventory management models, showing that this can lead to significant distortions, mainly to stock control of very low and low consumption items. The article thus proposes a framework to help managers determine the best stock policy to be adopted given product demand characteristics. The article also presents the ...

We study the robust capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) under demand uncertainty, which determines a minimum cost delivery of a product to geographically dispersed customers using capacity-constrained vehicles. Contrary to the deterministic CVRP, which postulates that the customer demands for the product are deterministic and known, the robust CVRP models the customer demands as random v...