In the fast-changing business environment, supply chains are affected by the production and inventory strategies, which influence the amount of information needed by the chains. The firms must therefore determine the best supply chain inventory strategies for their products. The lack of precise market demand and reliable supplier’s stock level makes it inappropriate to use the statistically-bas...

In this paper we impose a capacity restriction on a multi-echelon joint location-inventory model. The setting is that of a single product manufacturer distributing its product to a number of warehouses, each of which is assigned to a number of retailers. There is no lateral supply between warehouses and they do not share retailers. The model simultaneously makes decisions on location and invent...

T his paper studies echelon stock (R, nQ) policies in serial production/inventory systems with stochastic demand. We provide a recursive procedure to compute the steady state echelon inventory levels of the systems, which can be used to evaluate the long-run average holding and backorder costs as well as other performance measures. The procedure is based upon an observation of a relationship be...

This paper examines the effect that product pricing has on the dynamics and variability of a supply chain, with a focus in retail inventory. Pricing policies and strategies and the impacts of prices on demand and inventories within the retail supply chain environment are reviewed. Recent pricing and markdown research is examined. An example model is presented that is stochastic and uses simulat...

A new two-layered optimisation-based control approach is developed for multi-product, multi-echelon supply chain networks. The first layer employs simple feedback controllers to maintain inventory levels at all network nodes within pre-specified targets. The feedback controllers are embedded as equality constraints within an optimisation framework that incorporates model predictive control prin...

Pricing is one of the major aspects of decision making in supply chain. In the previous works mostly a centralized environment is considered indicating the retailers cannot independently apply their decisions on the pricing strategy. Although in a two-echelon decentralized environment it may be possible that supply chain contributors have encountered with different market power situations which...

One of the most important aspects affecting the performance of a supply chain is the management of inventories. Managing inventory in complex supply chains is typically difficult, and may have a significant impact on the customer service level and system-wide costs. The main challenge of inventory management is that almost every inventory problem involves multiple and conflicting objectives tha...

Lateral transshipments within an inventory system are stock movements between locations of the same echelon. These transshipments can be conducted periodically at predetermined points in time to proactively redistribute stock, or they can be used reactively as a method of meeting demand which cannot be satisfied from stock on hand. The elements of an inventory system considered, e.g. size, cost...