94%-effective policies for a two-stage serial inventory system with stochastic demand

94%-effective policies for a two-stage serial inventory system with stochastic demand

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Article ID: iaor200172
Country: United States
Volume: 45
Issue: 12
Start Page Number: 1679
End Page Number: 1696
Publication Date: Dec 1999
Journal: Management Science
Authors:
Keywords: demand, heuristics, stochastic processes
Abstract:

A two-stage inventory system is considered where Poisson demand occurs at Stage 1, and Stage 1 replenishes its inventory from Stage 2, which in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock. Each shipment, either to Stage 2 or to Stage 1, incurs a fixed setup cost. Under the assumption that the supply leadtime at Stage 2 is zero, we characterize a simple heuristic policy whose long-run average cost is guaranteed to be within 6% of optimality, i.e., a 94%-effective policy. The paper also provides heuristic policies for more general inventory systems and reports computational results.

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