In many contexts, logistics is used to enable competitive advantages and cost savings. For some companies, logistics itself is its core competency (i.e. logistics providers). In this context, vendor-managed inventory (VMI) systems are one of the most up-to-date strategies allowing companies to reach a superior performance. Under a VMI strategy, the replenishment and distribution making process ...

We consider a serial inventory system with N stages. The material flows from an outside supplier to stage N, then to stage N0 1, etc., and finally to stage 1 where random customer demand arises. Each stage replenishes a stage-specific inventory position according to a stagespecific reorder point/order quantity policy. Two variations of this policy are considered. One is based on echelon stock, ...

We study stochastic inventory planning systems with lost sales and censored demand under stationary and non-stationary settings. Contrary to classical inventory theory, we assume that no knowledge of demand is initially available, and lost sales in each period are unobservable. We take a non-parametric approach and propose adaptive inventory policies that generate a sequence of ordering decisio...

Cost-based filtering is a promising technique able to improve search performance in combinatorial optimization problems. Such a technique has already been successfully applied to stochastic inventory control problems. We focus on the class of production/inventory control problems that considers a single product and a single stocking location, given a stochastic demand with a known non-stationar...

An efficient humanitarian inventory control model and emergency logistics system plays a crucial role in maintaining reliable flow of vital supplies to the victims located in the shelters and minimizing the impacts of the unforeseen disruptions that can occur. This system should not only allow the efficient usage and distribution of emergency supplies but should also offer the ability to be int...

This paper is concerned with long-run average cost minimization of a stochastic inventory problem with Markovian demand, xed ordering cost, and convex surplus cost. The states of the Markov chain represent di erent possible states of the environment. Using a vanishing discount approach, a dynamic programming equation and the corresponding veri cation theorem are established. Finally, the existe...

This paper is concerned with long-run average cost minimization of a stochastic inventory problem with Markovian demand, fixed ordering cost, convex surplus cost, and lost sales. The states of the Markov chain represent different possible states of the environment. Using a vanishing discount approach, a dynamic programming equation and the corresponding verification theorem are established. Fin...

This paper is concerned with long-run average cost minimization of a stochastic inventory problem with Markovian demand, xed ordering cost, and convex surplus cost. The states of the Markov chain represent diierent possible states of the environment. Using a vanishing discount approach, a dynamic programming equation and the corresponding veriication theorem are established. Finally, the existe...

A model for comparing the inventory costs of purchasing under the economic order quantity (EOQ) system and the just-intime (JIT) order purchasing system in existing literature concluded that JIT purchasing was virtually always the preferable inventory ordering system especially at high level of annual demand. By expanding the classical EOQ model, this paper shows that it is possible for the EOQ...

We consider the problem of determining the optimal ordering and reordering policy for an inventory where the entire stockwill simultaneously become obsolete at some (typically random) time, T . Manymanufacturing, publishing, distribution, and high tech businesses face the challenge of maintaining inventories that do not age in the conventional sense; instead, they suddenly become obsolete and l...