Intermittent demand patterns are very difficult to forecast and they are, most commonly, associated with spare parts’ requirements. Most research in this area focuses on the control of inventories assuming that an appropriate estimator is in place to forecast demand and that the demand is represented by one of the standard statistical distributions. The choice of a demand distribution has an im...

A simulation based-decision support system for multi-product inventory control management is developed. The system permits management to obtain an inventory system-wide view of the effect of changes in decision variables on the performance measures of a furniture manufacturing firm. The simulation model considers the effect of variations in demand, reorder point, stock-control level, time betwe...

Exponential smoothing is often used to forecast lead-time demand for inventory control. In this paper, formulae are provided for calculating means and variances of lead-time demand for a wide variety of exponential smoothing methods. A feature of many of the formulae is that variances, as well as the means, depend on trends and seasonal effects. Thus, these formulae provide the opportunity to i...

This paper provides evidence that management in Japan uses share repurchases to change the ownership of their companies to protect them against unfriendly changes in control by outside shareholders. The paper documents the time series of stock repurchases made by Japanese companies over the period 2001-2014. We find that almost half of listed companies engage in share repurchases, and almost on...

We consider a manufacturer’s stochastic production/inventory problem under periodic review and present concepts for safety stock determination to cope with uncertainties that are caused by stochastic demand and different types of yield randomness. Order releases follow a linear control rule. Taking manufacturing lead times into account it turns out that safety stocks have to be considered that ...

We study a single-product periodic-review inventory system with multiple types of returns. The serviceable products used to fulfill stochastic customer demand can be either manufactured/ordered, or remanufactured from the returned products, and the objective is to minimize the expected total discounted cost over a finite planning horizon. We show that, under some circumstances but not all, the ...

Stochastic variability of biological processes and uncertainty of stock properties compel fisheries managers to look for tools to improve control over the stock. Inspired by animals exploiting hidden prey, we have taken a biomimetic approach combining catch and effort in a concept of Bayesian regulation (BR). The BR provides a real-time Bayesian stock estimate, and can operate without separate ...

This paper focuses on the problem of inventory control of production systems. The main contribution of the paper is that production systems are modeled as constrained switched linear systems and the inventory control problem is formulated as a constrained switched H∞ problem with a piecewise-affine (PWA) control law. The switching variable for the production systems modeled in this paper is the...