Article ID: | iaor2006415 |
Country: | Germany |
Volume: | 11 |
Issue: | 5/6 |
Start Page Number: | 421 |
End Page Number: | 446 |
Publication Date: | Dec 2005 |
Journal: | Journal of Heuristics |
Authors: | Raghavan N.R. Srinivasa, Roy Debjit |
Keywords: | organization, heuristics |
Manufacturing supply chains are considered as discrete event dynamical systems (DEDS) where coordination of material and information flows is essential to satisfy customer orders and to improve the bottomline of the constituent organizations. A critical problem that is often faced by distribution centres that hold finished good inventory is that of inventory rationing. Inventory rationing is a useful strategy to tackle the problem of conflicting objectives, i.e., minimizing inventory costs (holding and backorder) on the one hand and achieving the desired customer service levels (CSLs) on the other. The focus of this paper is to formulate Generalized Stochastic Petri net models to address the inventory rationing problem in the context of multi-echelon make-to-stock distribution chains, where the goods flow through multiple echelons, typically from product manufacturers all the way up-to the retail outlets. The statistical inventory control (SIC) policies modeled by the GSPN are (