Radio frequency identification (RFID)-enabled smart shelves have recently attracted enormous attention from both industry and academia. Retailers have an explosion of interest in deploying smart shelves for the automatic ordering and the reduction of inventory inaccuracy. This study explores the retailers’ optimal policy for investing in a smart shelf inventory control system. Since the decisio...

In this paper, we study the distribution network design problem integrating transportation and infinite horizon multiechelon inventory cost function. We consider the trade-off between inventory cost, direct shipment cost, and facility location cost in such a system. The problem is to determine how many warehouses to set up, where to locate them, how to serve the retailers using these warehouses...

Inventory control is a crucial activity for many companies. Given the recent advances in information technology, there have never been greater opportunities for coordinated inventory control across supply chain facilities. But how do we design efficient control methods and policies that take advantage of the detailed information that is now becoming available? This doctoral thesis investigates ...

In this paper, we study the stochastic transportation-inventory network design problem involving one supplier and multiple retailers. Each retailer faces some uncertain demand. Due to this uncertainty, some amount of safety stock must be maintained to achieve suitable service levels. However, risk-pooling benefits may be achieved by allowing some retailers to serve as distribution centers (and ...

The single-vehicle cyclic inventory routing problem (SV-CIRP) is concerned with a repeated distribution of a product from a single depot to a selected subset of retailers having stable demands. The objective is to determine the subset of retailers to cyclically replenish, the quantities to be delivered to each, and to design the vehicle routes so that the expected total distribution and invento...

Multi-echelon inventory systems are one of the most important and attractive areas in modelling supply chain management so that several researches and studies have been done about. In this paper, the total cost function of a two-echelon inventory system with central warehouse and many identical retailers controlled by continuous review inventory policy is estimated. We have assumed the demand i...

F sales forecasts for retailers can be improved if we incorporate cost of goods sold, inventory, and gross margin (defined by us as the ratio of sales to cost of goods sold) as three endogenous variables. We construct a simultaneous equations model, estimated using public financial and nonfinancial data, to provide joint forecasts of annual cost of goods sold, inventory, and gross margin for re...

We have considered a distribution inventory system with one warehouse and several retailers. Customer demand arrives at the retailers and the material flow between echelons is driven by reorder point/order quantity inventory control policies. Our objective is to calculate the long-run inventory statistics. The challenge in this system is to characterize the demand arrival process at the warehou...

In this paper, we extend the models in the literature [Lee, H.L., So, K.C., Tang, C., 2000. The value of information sharing in a two-level supply chain. Management Science 46 (5), 626–643; Raghunathan, S., Yeh, A.B., 2001. Beyond EDI: impact of continuous replenishment program (CRP) between a manufacturer and its retailers. Information Systems Research 12 (4), 406–419] to analyze the benefits ...