In many real-life contexts, inventory levels are only incompletely observed due to nonobservation of demand, discrepancies in transmitting sales data, transaction errors, spoilage, misplacement, or theft of inventory. We study a periodic review inventory system where the demand is not observed...

Information delays exist in an inventory system when it takes time to collect, process, validate, and transmit inventory/demand data. A general framework is developed in this paper to describe information flows in an inventory system with information delays. We characterize the suffcient...

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,...

In many inventory control contexts, inventory levels are only partially (i.e., not fully) observed. This may be due to non-observation of demand, spoilage, misplacement, or theft of inventory. We study a periodic review inventory system where the unmet demand is backordered. When inventory level...

This paper introduces recent developments in the analysis of inventory systems with partial observations. The states of these systems are typically conditional distributions, which evolve in infinite dimensional spaces over time. Our analysis involves introducing unnormalized probabilities to...

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...

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...

This entry is a brief survey of classical inventory models and their extensions in several directions such as world-driven demands, presence of forecast updates, multi-delivery modes and advanced demand information, incomplete inventory information, and decentralized inventory control in the...