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...

We consider a discrete review, single product, dynamic inventory model with stochastic demands. The ordering cost is assumed to consist of a linear purchase cost and a cost K for each vehicle used. We examine the simple policy: "If the stock level at the beginning of period n does not exceed...

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...

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...

Most office equipment is maintained by service organizations consisting of teams of service representatives. An important problem for the service organizations is the determination of the spare parts inventory to be carried by each service representative. This note presents a model for finding...

In this paper, we focus on a single order cycle of a warehouse, serving N retailers where the only shipments allowed during the cycle are from the warehouse to the retailers. For a simple ship-up-to-S allocation policy, we develop both the exact cost model and a computationally tractable...

This note gives an improved bound (\root 5 - 2)/2 \approx 0.1180 for the relative cost increase when using the deterministic EOQ formula as a heuristic solution when demands are stochastic. We also discuss under what circumstances this bound is tight.

This paper investigates the problem of sequencing N products on an assembly line with two objectives: minimizing (1) the risk of conveyor stoppage and (2) the total utility work. For a single station with arbitrary processing times, this problem is proved NP-hard in the strong sense for each of...

Lowe and Hurter introduced the "generalized market area problem" of simultaneously determining production levels and distribution patterns at n plants to satisfy demand distributed over a subset of R^k. Here we give simpler proofs and extensions of their results. We also show how the problem can...