A stochastic program based lower bound for assemble‐to‐order inventory systems

In this paper we introduce a multi‐stage stochastic program that provides a lower bound on the long‐run average inventory cost of a general class of assemble‐to‐order (ATO) inventory systems. The stochastic program also motivates a replenishment policy for these systems. Our lower bound generalizes a previous result of Dogru et al. (2010) for systems with identical component replenishment lead times to those with general deterministic lead times. We provide a set of sufficient conditions under which our replenishment policy, coupled with an allocation policy, attains the lower bound (and is hence optimal). We show that these sufficient conditions hold for two examples, a single product system and a special case of the generalized W model.