Manufacturers have increasingly instituted widespread mail-in rebate programs in recent years. Two primary purposes for rebates are to: (1) more directly impact consumer demand by reducing net retail price, and (2) capitalize on consumers' slippage behavior because not all consumers who intend...

Classical Economic Manufacturing Quantity (EMQ) models have usually ignored the possibility of process deterioration and the existence of defective items in the production lot. Moreover, the use of machine inspection for maintenance and restoration purposes has not been considered. On the other...

The multi-item joint replenishment problem is generalized to allow ordering costs to be dependent on the specific items jointly supplied. A fixed cycle approach is examined in which all the items of a group are always jointly replenished. A dynamic programming algorithm is developed for...

The optimal boundaries for class-based AS/RS systems are determined. A solution procedure is developed which requires only a one-dimensional search procedure. It is shown that most of the potential improvement in the expected one-way travel time can be obtained when the warehouse is divided into...

In this paper we consider the problem of developing an acquisition policy. Specifically, given a set of potential (qualified) suppliers, from whom should the firm buy the product, in what quantities, and how often? We provide properties of the optimal solution and relate them to the approach of...

In this paper, the joint problem of ordering and offering price discount by a supplier to his sole/major buyer is analyzed. The objective is to induce the buyer to alter his order schedule and size so that the supplier can benefit from lower set up, ordering, and inventory holding costs. We...

The problem of plant layout has generally been treated as a static one. In this paper, we deal with the dynamic nature of this problem. Both optimal and heuristic procedures are developed for this problem and are based on a dynamic programming formulation. The use of one of these approaches...