This paper presents a discrete time model of a multi-stage production system that faces two major types of uncertainties: the output rate at each production stage and the demand for the finished product. Our goal is to analyze the impact of these uncertainties on the production level and on the...

This paper considers the periodic review inventory problem for which one or more parameters of the demand distribution are unknown with a known prior distribution chosen from the natural conjugate family. The Bayesian formulation of this problem results in a dynamic program with a...

The effect of financial risks on (R, Q) inventory policies is analyzed in a real options framework. Simple adjustments of the usual formulas for R and Q are suggested and tested. Stochastic demand and purchase costs are considered, both with known systematic (business-cycle-related) risk. The...

This paper details the application of a class of heuristics to the Fixed-life Perishability Problem formulated by Nahmias (1975a) and Fries (1975). Various assumptions for this model include i.i.d. demand, linear ordering, holding and penalty costs. Goods have a known fixed lifetime and perished...

This note presents a model of an acyclic assembly system that faces yield loss and uncertain demand. While there is no known production rule for managing acyclic systems, we develop a production rule whose operating characteristics could be measured analytically. Thus, the operating...

In this paper, we consider multi-item inventory systems that contain repair kits of spare parts and tools and may include an inventory of spare machines as well. Demands occur in the form of field repair jobs, each requiring some collection of parts and tools for completion. If any required part...

We consider a two-echelon inventory system for service parts. To obtain high service levels at a low cost we allow not only for normal supply of parts but also for emergency supply options in terms of lateral transshipments and direct deliveries. After presenting the strategy we use for...

This research shows that organizations with a number of "sister" plants, warehouses, or other stocking points can profit from the concept of proactive use of transshipments as an element of their inventory control policy. For certain types of parts, employing transshipments can significantly...

This paper deals with a single--echelon inventory system consisting of a number of parallel local warehouses facing compound Poisson demand. There are standard holding and backorder costs as well as ordering costs at all warehouses. Normally, the warehouses replenish from an outside supplier....

Many organizations have only recently recognized that sharing information with other members in their supply chain can lead to signficant reduction in the total costs.Usually these information flows are incorporated into existing operating policies at the various parties.In this paper we argue...