This paper considers a single-echelon, continuous review, inventory system with a warehouse facing compound Poisson customer demand. The replenishment lead-time is constant. Demand that cannot be met directly is backordered. There are standard linear holding and backorder costs but no set-up or ordering cost. It is assumed that the demand process starts at a certain given time. Consequently, be...

BACKGROUND The systematic review is becoming an increasingly popular and established research method in public health. Obtaining systematic review skills are therefore becoming a common requirement for most public health researchers and practitioners. However, most researchers still remain apprehensive about conducting their first systematic review. This is often because an 'ideal' type of syst...

Background: This article is number 12 in a series of 21 articles on tools for evidenceinformed health policymaking and addresses the issue of decision making when there is insufficient evidence. Policymakers often have insufficient evidence to know with certainty what the impacts of a health policy or programme will be. They must still make decisions. Objectives: In this article, we suggest fou...

We study a single product inventory system with nonnegative setup cost in which the demand is a continuous random variable but orders are restricted to be integer valued. Optimal policies, when there are no setup costs, have a nice form. However, we show that, when the setup costs are nonzero, optimal policies may have a very counterintuitive form without any particular structure. We obtain a b...

We study a continuous-review acquisition problem, in which the raw material price follows a discrete-state Markov process and demand is compound Poisson. We show that one optimal policy is of the order-up-to type. Under our mean reversion and time continuity conditions, we further show that the order-up-to levels are decreasing at the current price level. At the same time, our computational stu...

This paper is motivated by inventory problems arising in supply chains characterized by continuous replenishment programs based on information exchanged (reviewed) only intermittently between a manufacturing system (supplier) and a customer (retailer). When the replenishment is once-per-period, rather than at any point of time, a well-known result is the optimality of the so-called myopic base-...

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...

We consider a single-item continuous-review (r, q) inventory system with a renewal demand process and i.i.d. stochastic leadtimes. Using a stationary marked point process technique and a heavy traffic limit, we prove a previous conjecture that inventory position and inventory on-order are asymptotically independent. We also establish closed-form expressions for the optimal policy parameters and...