A centralized multi-echelon, multi-product supply chain network is presented in a multi-period setting with products that show varying demand against price. An important consideration in such complex supply chains is to maintain system performance at high levels for varying demands that may be sensitive to product price. In order to examine the price-centric behavior of the customers, the conce...

Consider a continuous-review, serial inventory system with N stages. Material flows from stage N to stage N − 1, N − 1 to N − 2, etc., until stage 1, where stationary compound Poisson demand occurs. Let and denote the demand rate and the mean of demand size, and D t denote the demand over a time interval t. There is a constant lead time Lj for stage j . Define L̃i = ∑i j=1Lj . Inventory is contr...

Model predictive control (MPC) is presented as a robust, flexible decision framework for dynamically managing inventories and satisfying customer demand in demand networks. In this paper, a formulation and the benefits of an MPC-based, control-oriented tactical inventory management system meaningful to the semiconductor industry are presented via two significant examples. The translation of ava...

Nowadays, Companies have to deal with an uncertain demand which is more difficult to handle when it has a non-stationary pattern. Simultaneous decrease of customer service and increase of stock costs are the most significant effects of such demand uncertainty. To deal with this issue, inventory optimization models must be adapted to cover a multi-echelon network structure and to consider altern...

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...

Stochastic inventory control in multi-echelon systems poses hard problems in optimisation under uncertainty. Stochastic programming can solve small instances optimally, and approximately solve large instances via scenario reduction techniques, but it cannot handle arbitrary nonlinear constraints or other nonstandard features. Simulation optimisation is an alternative approach that has recently ...

We analyze a multistage inventory system with limited production capacity facing stochastic demands. Each node follows a periodic-review base-stock policy for echelon inventory: in each period, each node attempts to produce enough material to restore cumulative downstream inventory to a fixed target level. We develop approximations to the key measures of interest (average inventories, average b...

This paper aims to investigate the integrated production/distribution and inventory planning for perishable products with fixed life time in the constant condition of storage throughout a two-echelon supply chain by integrating producers and distributors. This problem arises from real environment in which multi-plant with multi-function lines produce multi-perishable products with fixed life ti...

We consider a single-item, two-echelon spare parts inventory model for repairable parts for capital goods with high down time costs. The inventory system consists of a central warehouse and multiple local warehouses, from where customers are served, and a central repair facility at an external supplier. When a part fails at a customer, his request for a ready-for-use part is immediately fulfill...