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...

inventory control is one of the most important issues in supply chain management. in this paper, a three-echelon production, distribution, inventory system composed of one producer, a set of wholesalers and retailers is considered. costumers' demands can be approximated by a normal distribution and the inventory policy is a kind of continuous review (r, q). in this paper, a model based on ...

On the basis of analyzing the shortages of present studies on multi-echelon inventory control, and considering some restrictions, this paper applies the joint replenishment strategy into the inventory system and builds a multi-product multi-echelon inventory control model. Then, an algorithm designed by Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used for solving the model. Finally, we respectively simulate the ...

The theory on multi-echelon production/inventory systems is a core theory within supply chain management. It provides useful insights for design of supply chains and may be used for tactical and operational planning decisions. The multi-echelon theory started with the seminal paper of Clark and Scarf in 1960. In this tutorial, we describe for which systems optimal policies are known, which key ...

To cope with current turbulent market demands, more robust inventory policies are needed for distribution networks, to lower the inventory cost as well as maintain high responsiveness. This paper analyzes the inventory policies in the context of complex multiechelon distribution networks and proposes an optimization and simulation integrating approach to robust inventory policies selection for ...

We consider the problem of minimizing the overall cost of a supply chain, over a possibility long horizon, under demand uncertainly which is known only crudely. Under such circumstances, the method of choice is Robust Optimization, in particular the Affinely Adjustable Robust Counterpart (AARC) method which leads to tractable deterministic optimization problems. The latter is due to a recent re...

We consider a multi-item two-echelon inventory system in which the central warehouse operates under a (Q,R) policy, and the local warehouses implement basestock policy. An exact solution procedure is proposed to find the inventory control policy parameters that minimize the system-wide inventory holding and fixed ordering cost subject to an aggregate mean response time constraint at each facility.

In multi-echelon inventory systems the performance of a given node is affected by events that occur at many other nodes and in many other time periods. For example, a supply disruption upstream will have an effect on downstream, customer-facing nodes several periods later as the disruption "cascades" through the system. There is very little research on stock-out prediction in single-echelon sys...