In the past few years, increasing numbers of automatic warehousing systems using computer-controlled stacker cranes have been installed. Our research concerns the scientific scheduling and design of these systems. There are three elements to scheduling: the assignment of multiple items to the...

Selecting and pricing product lines is an essential activity in many businesses. In recent years, quantitative approaches for such tasks have been gaining in popularity. One often-employed method is to use data from traditional rankings/ratings-based conjoint analysis and attack the product line...

This paper extends work previously reported on storage assignment rules for automatic warehousing systems to include interleaving; that is, the sequencing of storage and retrieve requests. Using both continuous analytical models and discrete evaluation procedures, this paper compares the...

This paper treats a depot-warehouse system in which demand occurs at the warehouse or retail level. This work differs from a number of other studies in that we allow item demands to be correlated both across warehouses and also correlated in time. Our motivation for this generalization arises...

Many manufacturing firms produce component parts both for assembly into new products and to meet orders for spare parts. An inventory model for this situation would involve two types of demands: probabilistic demand as spares and deterministic (or scheduled) withdrawals as components for...

Multi-echelon inventory systems are often controlled as a network of single-echelon inventory systems for simplicity of managerial authority, organizational control, and performance monitoring. This paper explores the amount of suboptimization in such a situation, using an actual demand data set...

This paper presents approximate analytical models to quantify the expected improvement in inventory investment when using a system approach to control inventory as opposed to a simpler item approach. A system approach ensures that a demand-weighted average fill rate is achieved at low inventory...

This note demonstrates that the model proposed by Bergstrom and Smith (B & S) for deterministic multi-item production planning can, with some reinterpretation, be used to solve two related stochastic multi-item production planning problems. Specifically, the benefits of individual item-by-item...

This research studies the impact of improved forecasts on the members of a two-stage supply chain. The supplier builds capacity based on original forecast information, and the manufacturer places its order after observing improved (but imperfect) demand information. We study three types of...

Investments in operating assets with identical expected discounted return and identical risk characteristics (i.e., variances and higher moments) when measured at the outset may have significantly different patterns of uncertainty resolution over their lives. The concept of uncertainty...