We study inventory control for rental operations in a closed-loop supply chain. In such a system (e.g., Netflix), customers create online queues in a service provider’s website to indicate the items that they would like to rent. Leveraging this advance demand information, we propose effective forecast models and formulate a multi-item inventory control problem. We prove that the (L,U) policy is...

In this paper, we propose a simple heuristic approach for the inventory control problem with stochastic demand and multiplicative random yield. Our heuristic tries to find the best candidate within a class of policies which are referred to in the literature as the linear inflation rule (LIR) policies. Our approach is computationally fast, easy to implement and intuitive to understand. Moreover,...

We consider the problem of determining the optimal ordering and reordering policy for an inventory where the entire stockwill simultaneously become obsolete at some (typically random) time, T . Manymanufacturing, publishing, distribution, and high tech businesses face the challenge of maintaining inventories that do not age in the conventional sense; instead, they suddenly become obsolete and l...

Product returns are characterized by considerable uncertainty on time and quantity. In the literature on inventory management for product return environments best forecasts of future returns are associated with methods that use the most information regarding product return history. In practice, however, data is often scarce and unreliable, while forecasts based on historical data, reliable or n...

Consider an inventory model which consists in controlling the level of stock of a single product where the demands D1, D2, . . . for the product in periods 1, 2, . . . are independently and identically distributed i.i.d random variables with density function ψ, and finite mean μ < ∞. Assume that at the beginning of each period the system is reviewed and we are allowed to increase the level of s...

Abstract In this paper we propose a modification to the standard forecasting, periodic order-up-tolevel inventory control approach to dealing with intermittent demand items, when the lead-time length is shorter than the average inter-demand interval. In particular, we develop an approach that relies upon the employment of separate estimates of the interdemand intervals and demand sizes, when de...

purchase or non-purchase of one item or itemset on the purchase or non-purchase of another item or itemset. The research in this paper models for incorporating purchase dependencies in retail multi-item inventory management. One illustrative example has been discussed with data mining in retail sale data. Various types of purchase dependencies including negative dependency have been identified ...