In this paper we study the long-standing open question regarding the computational complexity of one of the core problems in supply chains management, the periodic joint replenishment problem. This problem has received a lot of attention over the years and many heuristic and approximation algorithms were suggested. However, in spite of the vast effort, the complexity of the problem remained unr...

In most multi-item inventory systems, the ordering costs consist of a major cost and a minor cost for each item included. Applying for every individual item a cyclic inventory policy, where the cycle length is a multiple of some basic cycle time, reduces the major ordering costs. An e cient algorithm to determine the optimal policy of this type is discussed in this paper. It is shown that this ...

During the last two decades, many heuristic procedures for the joint replenishment problem have appeared in the literature. The only available optimal solution procedure was based on an enumera-tive approach and was computationally prohibitive. In this paper we present an alternative optimal approach based on global optimisation theory. By applying Lipschitz optimisation one can nd a solution w...

This study is an extension of the Joint Replenishment Problem (JRP) that takes into accounts the warehouse-space restrictions in a distribution center. The focus of this study is to determine the lot sizes of each product under power-of-two policy to minimize the total costs per unit time and to generate a feasible replenishment schedule of multiple products without exceeding the available war...

In this article, we deal with the problem of determining the economic operating policy when a number of items are to be procured from a number of suppliers offering different quantity discounts schedules. In such inventory problems, a fixed cost is incurred with each replenishment order, independent of the suppliers as well as the items involved in the order. Further, the item involves a minor ...

We study the joint replenishment problem (JRP) for M items under deterministic demand, with a minimum order quantity constraint for each item in the replenishment order. We first study an iterative procedure that proves to be not efficient in this case. Further, we derive bounds on the basic cycle time and propose an efficient global optimisation procedure to solve the JRP with constraints. Mor...

Joint managed inventory is an advanced supply chain inventory management tool, which will effectively tackle the complicated problem between the inventory cost of supply chain and service level. The research on inventory model and its’ control under JMI environment is a hot issue at present. In this paper, the authors deeply discuss the question of the inventory time costs about the multi-produ...

This paper deals with the problem of coordinated ordering of items having deterministic but time varying demands where there is a common ordering cost if one or more of these items are ordered in addition to individual items ordering costs. To solve this NP-hard problem we propose a number of heuristics. Also we report on a comparative study that we undertaken to evaluate the relative performan...