| Article ID: | iaor20043451 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 24 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 115 |
| End Page Number: | 125 |
| Publication Date: | Apr 1999 |
| Journal: | Operations Research Letters |
| Authors: | Srinivasan Ramesh, Swaminathan Jayashankar M. |
| Keywords: | stochastic processes |
In recent years management of customer requirements has been the foremost concern of most manufacturers. In this paper, we consider a single-period problem in which the manufacturer faces stochastic demand and individual service level constraints from multiple customers. We present a formulation for the problem that utilizes the structure of the underlying allocation problem and provide an algorithm that generates the optimal procurement quantity under the optimal random allocation policy. For a special case when there are two identical customers and their demand is jointly uniform, we derive an analytical expression for the optimal procurement quantity.