This paper examines a two-level distribution system consisting of a central warehouse (CW) supplying several branch warehouses (BW's), which, in turn, supply normally-distributed customer demands in a periodic-review environment. The CW replenishes system inventory using a base-stock...

This paper presents a model of an (s, S) inventory system in which there are two priority classes of customers. The model treats excess demands as lost sales and can accommodate an arbitrary deterministic lead time. After considering the associated Markov-chain model, an approximate,...

This paper extends recent results of Baker et al. (Baker, K. R., M. J. Magazine, H. L. W. Nuttle. 1986. The effect of commonality on safety stocks in a simple inventory model. Management Sci. 32 982--988.) in understanding the impact of component commonality on stocking levels under service...

A production line is treated as a series arrangement of k work stations. An unlimited supply of raw production items is available at the first station, and each item passes through all of die stations in sequence. The service time for a single item at station j is assumed to be a random variable...

The coordinated multi-item inventory problem refers to the problem of managing inventories where there is a joint fixed cost for replenishing plus an item-by-item fixed cost for each item included in the replenishment order. Given that the optimal solution is likely to be too complex, attention...

We consider a problem faced by a contract assembler that both assembles finished goods and procures the associated component parts for one of its major customers. Because of rapid changes in technology and ongoing engineering changes, all parts subject to obsolescence are purchased only for the...

The paper deals with a nonconvex, bivariate minimization problem arising in a heuristic inventory model of Hadley and Whitin (Hadley, G., T. M. Whitin. 1963. Analysis of Inventory Systems. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ.). An approach is suggested whereby the existence and uniqueness...

The fill rate (the proportion of demand that is satisfied from stock) is a viable alternative in inventory models to the hard-to-quantify penalty cost. However, a number of difficulties have impeded its implementation, among them that the existing cycle-based approximate solutions do not reflect...

We argue that standard approximations for two often-used inventory service-level measures may perform poorly in many situations. Then we confirm the long-standing conjecture that the (relatively) exact formulas for these quantities are convex functions of the relevant control variables. Both...