Article ID: | iaor20081595 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 108 |
Issue: | 1/2 |
Start Page Number: | 388 |
End Page Number: | 398 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2007 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Economics |
Authors: | Silver Edward A., Minner Stefan |
The paper addresses the problem of determining replenishment timing and quantities in a multi-product environment where the aggregate level of inventory at any time is limited by the available warehouse capacity. Demands are random following a compound-Poisson process and replenishment lead times are assumed to be negligible. We formulate the problem as a Markov-decision-problem that can be used to solve small problem instances to optimality. For larger problems we suggest several heuristics for setting reorder points and reorder quantities. The performance of the proposed methods is compared in a numerical study which shows that the proposed dynamic heuristic on average gives a better performance than the static counterparts.