An important phenomenon in supply chain management, known as the bullwhip effect, suggests that demand variability increases as one moves up a supply chain. This paper examines the influence of different replenishment policies on the occurrence of the bullwhip effect. The paper demonstrates that certain replenishment policies can in themselves be inducers of the bullwhip effect, while others in...

Fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA) is one of the recent evolutionary computation approaches. This paper presents an effective and improved FOA (IFOA) for optimizing numerical functions and solving joint replenishment problems (JRPs). In the proposed IFOA, a new method of maintaining the population diversity is developed to enhance the exploration ability. Fruit flies with better fitness val...

In this paper, we propose an optimisation model to determine the product assortment, inventory replenishment, display area and shelf space allocation decisions that jointly maximize the retailer’s profit under shelf space and backroom storage constraints. The variety of products to be displayed in the retail store, their display locations within the store, their ordering quantities, and the all...

In this paper we present new bounds on the basic cycle time for optimal methods to solve the JRP. They are tighter than the ones reported in Viswanathan [7]. We carry out extensive numerical experiments to compare them and to investigate the computational complexity.

T paper considers a multicomponent, multiproduct periodic-review assemble-to-order (ATO) system that uses an independent base-stock policy for inventory replenishment. Product demands in each period are integer-valued correlated random variables, with each product being assembled from multiple units of a subset of components. The system quotes a prespecified response time window for each produc...

I n this paper we consider a cooperative, two-level supply chain consisting of a retailer and a supplier. As in many practical settings, the supply chain members progressively observe market signals that enable them to explain future demand. The demand itself evolves according to an auto-regressive time series. We examine three types of supply chain configurations. In the first setting, the ret...

We consider the problem of determining (for a short lifecycle) retail product initial and replenishment order quantities that minimize the cost of lost sales, back orders, and obsolete inventory. We model this problem as a two-stage stochastic dynamic program, propose a heuristic, establish conditions under which the heuristic finds an optimal solution, and report results of the application of ...

Contingency theory provides a theoretical framework for analysing the implementation differences in the configuration of Information Systems for Continuous Replenishment in the retail sector. The configuration can be broken down into three arrangements: data processing and sharing arrangement, technical arrangement, and information management arrangement. The contingency factors, and their infl...

This paper presents the feature-replenishment technique used by our 3D Feature Based Tracker (3DFBT). The 3DFBT is a distributed , agent-based system for real-time 3D visual motion tracking using stereo. Feature replenishment means that the system can nd new trackable features to replace those lost to noise and occlusion, and on new objects entering the scene, or revealed by dis-occlusion. This...