Inventory control is an important factor in reducing the operating costs of the supply chain. This study proposes using a fuzzy inventory controller to make the ordering decision for the members in a supply chain. Such a controller is expressed as a set of fuzzy rules, which allows the manager to summarize his/her experience of reasoning process as well as incorporate conventional proportional ...

We consider the optimal control of an assemble-to-order (ATO) system with m components, a single end-product, and n customer classes. Demand from each class occurs continuously over time according to a Poisson process. Components are produced in separate production facilities, each with a finite production rate and exponentially distributed production times. Components can be stocked ahead of d...

The inventory level shown in the Information System contrary to popular belief and assumptions in most academic papers and in spite of the considerable amounts invested in information technology, is often inaccurate. The inventory inaccuracy occurs when the inventory shown in the Information System is not in agreement with the actually available inventory. In this paper, we first describe the m...

One of the implicit assumptions considered in the majority of investigations performed in the area of inventory management is that the physical flow of products that passes through an inventory system as well as the associated information flow are free from defects, i.e. for a given type of product, the quantity received matches exactly the quantity ordered or there are no errors occurring duri...

The efficient management of a distribution system requires coordination between transportation planning and inventory control. Small and frequent shipments can reduce inventory levels while maintaining high customer service levels, but they increase unit transportation costs due to inappropriate utilization of the vehicles and more handling costs. On the other hand shipment consolidation polici...

Information sharing is an important component of cooperation in supply chain management. This paper presents a study to evaluate the impact of information sharing on inventory and expected cost in a two-level supply chain with multiple retailers. Three levels of information sharing are given and the optimal inventory policy under each level is derived. We show that both the inventory level and ...

We consider the periodic-review, single-location, single-product, production/inventory control problem under non stationary demand and service-level constraints. The product is perishable and has a fixed shelf life. Costs comprise fixed ordering costs and inventory holding costs. For this inventory system we discuss a number of control policies that may be adopted. For one of these policies, we...

We propose a novel approach to optimum inventory control by modeling a commodity trader’s inventory investment as a portfolio of forward commitments taking explicit account of the dynamics of demands, costs and prices in open markets. We apply the robust real-asset martingale valuation methodology to derive a closed-form solution for the inventory value and a simple and intuitive optimality con...

We consider stochastic nite-horizon inventory models with discrete distributions that are incompletely speciied by selected moments, percentiles, or a combination of moments and per-centiles. The objective is to determine an inventory policy that minimizes the maximum expected cost over the class of demand distributions satisfying the speciications described above. We show that many inventory m...