The relationship between aggregate safety stock inventory levels and component part commonality is developed. A simulation experiment strongly supports the functional form of this relationship in an uncertain operating environment. Managers can use these equations to assess the trade-offs...

This paper concerns a multilocation newsboy problem with normal demand at each location and identical linear holding and penalty cost functions at each location. Consolidation of demand from several facilities is considered, and an expression is derived for the resulting expected holding and...

This research examines the effectiveness of alternative strategies for dealing with the problem of order instability, or nervousness, which occurs in Material Requirements Planning systems. Nervousness can be particularly disruptive in multi-level production processes where a change in order...

Inventory systems where leadtimes are stochastic and independent, so that orders are not restricted to arrive in the same sequence in which they were placed, can arise if the vendor with whom orders are placed is unreliable in processing them or if orders for the same item are placed with...

This study explores the due-date performance of job shop control systems which base job due dates on a time-phased representation of the workload and the machine capacity in the shop. The performance is measured by the mean and the standard deviation of the lateness. Two parameters are used to...

In production scheduling, time performance is usually taken to be the province of sequencing models which take task processing times to be given. However, in practice, processing times can often be controlled by the choice of lot sizes which thus have a major impact on makespan, waiting times,...