This article studies specific aspects of the joint replenishment problem in a realsupply chain setting. Particularly we analyze the effect on inventory performance of havingminimum order quantities for the different products in the joint order, given a complextransportation cost structure. The...

In equipment-intensive industries such as truck manufacturing, electronics manufacturing, photo copiers,and airliners, service parts are often slow moving items for which, in some cases, the transshipment timeis not negligible. However, this aspect is hardly considered in the existing spare...

This paper extends a fundamental result about single-item inventory systems. This approachallows more general performance measures, demand processes and order policies, and leads toeasier analysis and implementation, than prior research. We obtain closed form expressions forthe Laplace...

In a recent paper, Fisher et al. (2001) present a method tomitigate end-effects in lot sizing by including a valuation term for end-of-horizon inventory in the objective function of the short-horizon model. Computational tests show that the proposed method outperforms the Wagner-Whitin algorithm...

In most multi-item inventory systems, the ordering costs consist of a major cost and a minor cost for each item included. Applying for every individual item a cyclic inventory policy, where the cycle length is a multiple of some basic cycle time, reduces the major ordering costs. An efficient...

In this chapter we discuss a tactical optimisation problem that arises in a multistage distribution system where customer orders can be delivered from any stockpoint. A simple rule to allocate orders to locations is a break quantity rule, which routes large orders to higher-stage stockpoints and...