Abstract: It has been suggested by many supply chain practitioners that in certain cases inventory can have a stimulating effect on the demand. In mathematical terms this amounts to the demand being a function of the inventory level alone. In this work we propose a logistic growth model for the inventory dependent demand rate and solve first the continuous time deterministic optimal control pro...

We address the inventory planning problem in process networks under uncertainty through stochastic programming models. The scope of inventory planning requires the formulation of multiperiod models to represent the time-varying conditions of industrial process, but the multistage stochastic programming formulations are often too large to solve. We propose a policy-based approximation of the mul...

In this chapter we outline the importance of facility location decisions in supply chain design. We begin with a review of classical models including the traditional fixed charge facility location problem. We then summarize more recent research aimed at expanding the context of facility location decisions to incorporate additional features of a supply chain including LTL vehicle routing, invent...

Decision making plays an important role in economics, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, statistics and many other fields. In each field, decision making consists of identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues that define the decision. In any field, the nature of the decisions is affected by environmental characteristics. In this paper, we are considered the production planning pro...

Many real-world problems in the production and logistics business are NPhard even in their deterministic representation, and actually also show stochastic behaviour, where even the mathematical description of the – frequently empirical – distributions is difficult or even impossible. Therefore, an approach is acquired that enables the search for valid and reasonably good solutions under represe...

We consider a production-inventory system where the production and demand follow Poisson processes whose rates are modulated by an external stochastic environment process. We study two such systems: with and without an external supplier, and show an interesting stochastic decomposition relationship between the steady state distribution of inventory levels in these two systems. We consider the o...