Consider a single commodity inventory system in which the demand is modelled by a sequence of i.i.d. random variables that can take negative values. Such problems have been studied in the literature under the name cash management and relate to the variations of the on-hand cash balances of financial institutions. The possibility of a negative demand also models product returns in inventory syst...

For general state and action space Markov decision processes, we present sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions of the average cost optimality inequalities. These conditions also imply the convergence of both the optimal discounted cost value function and policies to the corresponding objects for the average costs per unit time case. Inventory models are natural applications of ou...

Inventory carrying costs represent a considerable portion of business logistics costs for manufacturing, and include the costs of interest, taxes, obsolescence, depreciation, insurance, and warehousing. Using an automated supply chain management system, these business logistics costs, particularly the inventory carrying costs and the logistics administration costs, can be reduced. The MIDAS sys...

In this paper we introduce the optimal solution for a simple and yet practical inventory policy with the important characteristic which eliminates the uncertainty in demand for suppliers. In this new policy which is different from the classical inventory policies, the time interval between any two consecutive orders is fixed and the quantity of each order is one. Assuming the fixed ordering cos...