Firms have very different inventory levels. How much of this heterogeneity is due to differences among firms, versus among industries? Using all observations in COMPUSTAT for 1950 through 2004, we find that both industry and firm effects are significant. Further, firm effects are as strong as,...

This paper demonstrates optimal policies for capacitated serial multiechelon production/inventory systems. Extending the Clark and Scarf (1960) model to include installations with production capacity limits, we demonstrate that a modified echelon base-stock policy is optimal in a two-stage...

We study the optimal policies of capacitated two-echelon serial inventory systems. For a system with smaller downstream capacity, we fully characterize the optimal policy using an intuitive backward induction. The key lies in two inductive assumptions: (a) if initially the stock level at the...

Inventory control is among the most important topics in operations research because of large investments in inventory and their effect on the profitability of the firms. A systematic analysis of inventory problems began with the development of the classical EOQ formula of Ford W. Harris in 1913,...

In this paper we develop a combined inventory-transportation system. The general idea is to integrate a simple replenishment policy with a routing component to derive operationally consistent standard routes as a basis for milk run design. The most interesting feature of the approach is that we...

In this paper, we consider a continuous review inventory system of a slow moving item for which the demand rate drops to a lower level at a pre-determined time. Inventory system is controlled according to one-for-one replenishment policy with fixed lead time. Adaptation to the lower demand rate...

We consider a stochastic multi-product inventory model with a ware-housing constraint with the objective of minimizing the expected long-run average cost. Using the vanishing discount approach, a dynamic programming equation and the corresponding verification result are established. The...

We propose a model where customers are classified into two groups: short lead-time customers who require the product immediately and long lead-time customers to whom the supplier may deliver either immediately or in the next cycle. Unmet orders are backlogged with associated costs. Specifically,...

This article analyzes a discrete time lost sales inventory system with partially observed demand and unobserved shrinkages which happen both before and after the demand realization. When the demand exceeds the remaining inventory, the unmet demand is lost and unobserved. This problem in general...