We consider an inventory system with one warehouse and N retailers. Lead times are constant and the retailers face independent Poisson demand. Replenishments are one-for-one. We provide simple recursive procedures for determining the holding and shortage costs of different control policies.

In inventory systems with several bases that support different geographical regions, it is quite common to allow emergency lateral transshipments between the bases. This may be advantageous if neighbouring bases are at shorter distances than the central depot or the external supplier. This paper provides a new technique for modelling such lateral transshipments in continuous review inventory systems with one-for-one replenishments and Poisson demand. We apply this technique to a two-echelon system with repairable items.

No abstract

We consider a two-level inventory system with one warehouse and N identical retailers. Lead times (transportation times) are constant and the retailers face independent Poisson demand. In a previous paper, we derived a recursive procedure for determining the policy costs for an average item in case of one-for-one replenishment policies. In this paper, we show how these results can be used for the exact or approximate evaluation of more general policies where both the retailers and the warehouse order in batches. We compare our methods to the method recently suggested by A. Svoronos and P. Zipkin.

This paper deals with a single--echelon inventory system consisting of a number of parallel local warehouses facing compound Poisson demand. There are standard holding and backorder costs as well as ordering costs at all warehouses. Normally, the warehouses replenish from an outside supplier. However, lateral transshipments between the warehouses are also possible. Such transshipments take no time but incur additional costs. When a demand occurs at a warehouse, the question is whether the whole demand or part of it should be covered by a lateral transshipment from another warehouse. Given a set of alternative decisions, our decision rule minimizes the expected costs under the assumption that no further transshipments will take place. This rule is then used repeatedly as a heuristic. A simulation study illustrates how the suggested technique performs under different conditions.Inventory Control, Emergency Supply, Lateral Transshipments, Stochastic

This paper compares installation and echelon stock policies for multilevel inventory control. The major results are for serial and assembly systems. For (Q, r)-rules, echelon stock policies are, in general, superior to installation stock policies. A Kanban-policy is identified as a restricted type of installation stock (Q, r)-policy.multiechelon inventory control, reorder point policies, serial and assembly systems

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.inventory/production, lot sizing, error bound

We consider a two-level inventory system with one central warehouse and N retailers. All installations apply different continuous review installation stock (R,Q) policies. The retailers face independent compound Poisson demand processes. Transportation times are constant. We present a method for exact evaluation of control policies that provides the complete probability distributions of the retailer inventory levels.