In many industrial sectors, firms are dealing with a demand which is more and more uncertain often due to the supply chain structure. One of the most critical effects of demand uncertainty is the simultaneous increase of inventories and decrease of customer service. This work describes an integrated system for managing inventories in a multi-echelon spare parts supply chain, in which customers ...

This paper considers a two-echelon distribution inventory system with a central warehouse and a number of retailers. There is direct customer demand also at the warehouse. If this upstream demand requires a high service, it may be advantageous to give higher priority to customer orders compared to retailer replenishments. We suggest and evaluate two techniques for handling this situation. One t...

Given stock allocation in an inventory system, it is necessary to do reallocation periodically to address inventory imbalance and maximize availability. In this paper, we allow two opportunities to perform reallocation within a replenishment cycle. We derive a mathematical model to dynamically determine when to reallocate and how to reallocate. Experimental results show that multiplereallocatio...

The research in this paper is motivated by a real life spare parts networks for complex technical systems in oil refining sector. At the customers the availability of the installed technical systems often is essential for the primary process. Hence, they require a high availability. For improve the management of the spare parts inventory the main company (the customer) has developed a new strat...

University. One of my reasons for choosing RAND rather than a more conventional academic appointment was my desire to be involved in applied rather than abstract mathematics. I could not have selected a better location to achieve this particular goal. George Dantzig had arrived recently and was in the process of applying linear programming techniques to a growing body of basic problems. Richard...

A central question in supply chain management is how to coordinate activities and inventories over a large number of stages and locations, while providing a high level of service to end customers. One theoretically and practically important methodology for addressing this problem is the guaranteed service (GS) framework, in which the stages of the supply chain operate according to base stock po...

The Multi-Echelon Distribution Supply Chain (MEDSC) is a multifaceted structure, focusing on the integration of all factors that involved in the overall distribution process of finished products to the customers. The growing interest in multi-echelon distribution systems has highlighted the need to adopt an appropriate approach to ensure the efficient management of their complexity. While there...

In this paper, we devise a framework for obtaining the optimal ordering policy in a single location, continuous review inventory system with arbitrary inter-demand times. We show that it is optimal to order at demand arrival epochs only if the inter-demand time has constant or decreasing failure rate (CFR or DFR). When the inter-demand time has increasing failure rate (IFR), we show that the op...

In this paper, we consider a supply chain model consisting of a single product, one supplier and multiple retailers. Demand at the retailers is random, but stationary. Each retailer places her orders to the supplier according to the well known (Q,R) policy. We assume that the supplier has on-line information about the demand as well as inventory activities of the product at each retailer and em...