The present paper discusses an approach to solve the joint replenishment problem in a production environment with concave production cost functions. Under this environment, the model leads to a global optimization problem, which is investigated by using some standard results from convex...

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 paper we analyse the effect of satisfying in a different way customers with an order larger than a prespecified cutoff transaction size, in a simple newsboy setting. For compound Poisson demand with discrete order sizes, we show how to determine the expected costs and the optimal cutoff...

In this paper we discuss a general framework for single item inventory control models. This framework is based on the regenerative structure of these models. Using results from the theory of regenerative processes a unified presentation of those models is presented. Although most of the results...

During the last two decades, many heuristic procedures for the joint replenishment problem have appeared in the literature. The only available optimal solution procedure was based on an enumerative approach and was computationally prohibitive. In this paper we present an alternative optimal...

In multi-echelon distribution systems it is usually assumed that demand is only satisfied from the lowest echelon. In this paper we will consider the case where demand can be satisfied from any level in the system. However, then the problem arises of how to allocate orders from customers to the...

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...

The repair kit problem is that of finding the optimal set of parts in the kit of a repairman. An important aspect of this problem, in many real-life situations, is that several job-sites are visited before a kit is restocked. In this paper, we present two heuristics for solving the multiple-job...

In this paper we consider the capacitated lot-sizing problem (CLSP) with linear costs. It is known that this problem is NP-hard, but there exist special cases that can be solved in polynomial time. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we derive a backward algorithm based on the forward...

This paper examines the algorithms proposed in the literature for finding good critical level policies in the (S-1,S) lost sales inventory model with multiple demand classes. Our main result is that we establish guaranteed optimality for two of these algorithms. This result is extended to...