Supply contracts are designed to minimize inventory costs or to hedge against undesirable events (e.g., shortages) in the face of demand or supply uncertainty. In particular, replenishment terms stipulated by supply contracts need to be optimized with respect to overall costs, profits, service levels, etc. In this paper, we shall be primarily interested in minimizing an inventory cost function ...

This work is motivated by the need to solve the inventory routing problem when implementing a business practice called vendor managed inventory replenishment (VMI). With VMI, vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished at each customer. The inventory routing problem attempts to coordinate inventory replenishment and transportation i...

A disaster inventory system is considered in which two substitutable items are stored for disaster management. In the event of disaster management, a particular product may become stock-out and the situation warrants that a demand for the particular product during its stock-out period may be substituted with another available similar product in the inventory. From the utility point of view, con...

In many industrial environments there is a significant class of problems for which the perishable nature of the inventory cannot be ignored in developing replenishment order plans. Food is the most salient example of a perishable inventory item. In this work, we consider the periodic-review, single-location, single-product production/inventory control problem under non-stationary stochastic dem...

This paper examines “distribution policies” — that is, combined system inventoryreplenishment, vehicle routing and inventory-allocation policies — designed to minimize total expected purchasing and inventory-management (i.e., inventory-holding and backordering) costs/period for a one-warehouse N-retailer “symmetric” distribution system managed under a periodic-review policy. With respect to dyn...

Title of Dissertation: ONLINE INVENTORY REPLENISHMENT AND FLEET ROUTING DECISIONS UNDER REAL-TIME INFORMATION Ricardo Giesen, Ph.D., 2007 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Hani S. Mahmassani, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department Logistics managers rely on increasingly sophisticated technologies to track demand and associated inventories, allowing rapid response to meet anticipated d...

We consider a periodic-review, serial inventory system, in which each stage replenishes inventory according to an echelon-stock (r, nQ, T ) policy – a standard echelon-stock (r, nQ) policy executed every T periods. Demands are independent, identically distributed in different periods and occur at the most downstream stage. Two types of fixed costs are considered: setup cost and replenishment co...

This paper considers a continuous-review, single-product production-inventory system with a constant replenishment rate, compound Poisson demands and lost-sales. Two objective functions that represent metrics of operational costs are considered: (1) the sum of the expected discounted inventory holding costs and lost-sales penalties, both over an infinite time horizon, given an initial inventory...