In recent years, there has been an increasing adoption of returns policies in the coordination of the supply chain, where market demand is always assumed to be satisfied by manufacturing or by ordering from suppliers. However, many industries face the important decision of how to balance their inventory level. This problem has long been studied in financial institutions such as banks. This stud...

 Normally, the real-world inventory control problems are imprecisely defined and human interventions are often required to solve these decision-making problems. In this paper, a realistic inventory model with imprecise inventory costs have been formulated for deteriorating items under trade credit policy within the economic production quantity (EPQ) framework. We assume that the supplier would...

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...

The single-item stochastic inventory control problem is to find an inventory replenishment policy in the presence of independent discrete stochastic demands under periodic review and finite time horizon. In this paper, we prove that this problem is intractable and for any 2 > 0, we design an algorithm with running time polynomial in the size of the problem input and in 1/2, that finds a policy ...

In this paper, a continuous review inventory system is considered in which an order in a batch of size Q is placed immediately after the inventory position reaches R. Transportation time is constant and demands are assumed to be generated by a stationary Poisson process with one unit demand at a time. Demands not covered immediately from the inventory are backordered. In a recent paper, the exa...

This paper formulates a stochastic inventory model for a single-period seasonal or fashion product inventory system consisting of multiple stocking echelons in series and retailers. By transforming model, an equivalent two-stage stochastic linear program model is developed to solve this stochastic inventory problem, which makes the inventory problem easier to analyze. The optimal placement poli...

We consider a supply chain consisting of n locations replenished at the beginning of each period by a supplier. These locations may coordinate in order to balance their inventory level through transshipment. Transshipment is the items transfer from location having an inventory excess to another in need. The transshipment problem consists to determine the initial inventory level where a transshi...

We explore the management of inventory for stochastic-demand systems, where the product’s supply is randomly disrupted for periods of random duration, and demands that arrive when the inventory system is temporarily out of stock become a mix of backorders and lost sales. The stock is managed according to the following modified (s , S) policy: If the inventory level is at or below s and the supp...

Based on the real-world inventory control problem of a capacitated healthcare apparel service centre in Hong Kong which provides tailor-made apparel-making services for the elderly and disabled people, this paper studies a partial backordered continuous review inventory control problem in which the product demand follows a Poisson process with a constant lead time. The system is controlled by a...

In many inventory control contexts, inventory levels are only partially (i.e., not fully) observed. This may be due to non-observation of demand, spoilage, misplacement, or theft of inventory. We study a partially observed inventory system where the demand is not observed, inventory level is noticed when it reaches zero, the unmet demand is lost, and replenishment orders must be decided so as t...