Given the order cycles of items in joint replenishment, no closed-form formula or efficient method is known to compute the exact inventory cost. Previous studies avoid the difficulty by restricting the replenishment policy to the cases where the order cycle of each item is a multiple of the cycle of the most frequently ordered item. This simplifies the computation but may entail sub-optimality ...

This paper presents a study of solving the joint replenishment problem (JRP) by using the RAND method, a heuristic approach that has been proven to find almost as good as optimal solutions, under uncertain customer demands and inaccurate unit holding cost estimation. The classical JRP deals with the issue of determining a replenishment policy that minimizes the total cost of replenishing multip...

During a research project to improve the performance and operation of shower dips, a series of measurements of the diazinon based dip-wash concentrations were taken. These measurements, although not replicated, indicated that the concentrations were falling to levels which were considered to be too low. As a result a replicated trial was conducted on the same shower dip, modified as per the fin...

Inventory record inaccuracy is a significant problem for retailers using automated inventory management systems. While investments in preventative and corrective measures can be effective remedies, gains can also be achieved through inventory management tools that account for record errors. In this paper, we consider intelligent inventory management tools that account for record errors using a ...

Recent studies have shown that environmental energy harvesting technologies have the potential to provide perpetual operation to rechargeable sensor networks. However, due to the large variations of the ambient energy source, such networks could only support low-rate data services and their performance is influenced by numerous unpredictable environmental factors. In order to bridge this gap to...

We propose a robust optimization approach to address a multi-period, inventory control problem under ambiguous demands, that is, only limited information of the demand distributions such as mean, support and some measures of deviations. Our framework extends to correlated demands and is developed around a factor-based model, which has the ability to incorporate business factors as well as time ...

Multiple synaptic vesicle (SV) retrieval modes exist in central nerve terminals to maintain a continual supply of SVs for neurotransmission. Two such modes are clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), which is dominant during mild neuronal activity, and activity-dependent bulk endocytosis (ADBE), which is dominant during intense neuronal activity. However, little is known about how activation of th...