Article ID: | iaor20003294 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 45 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 904 |
End Page Number: | 918 |
Publication Date: | Nov 1997 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Parlar M., Gurler U. |
This paper considers a stocharstic inventory model in which supply availability is subject to random fluctuations that may arise due to machine breakdowns, strikes, embargoes, etc. It is assumed that the inventory manager deals with two suppliers who may be either individually ON (available) or OFF (unavailable). Each supplier's availability is modeled as a semi-Markov (alternating renewal) process. We assume that the durations of the ON periods for the two suppliers are distributed as Erlang random variables. The OFF periods for each supplier have a general distribution. In analogy with queuing notations, we call this an