Inventory policies for a supplier facing mixed periodic demand in a single‐supplier multi‐retailer supply chain

Inventory policies are investigated for a supplier facing multiple retailers in a two‐echelon supply chain. Given the retailers implement EOQ policy, the order requests released by all retailers form a mixed periodic demand stream to the supplier. We define a unit period and a set of review intervals for the supplier to manage inventory periodically. Method of algorithms and searching procedures are developed to obtain appropriate inventory policy for the supplier. The behaviour of the obtained inventory policy such that the supplier's time‐average total cost is minimised repeats for every certain periods and coincides with the sequence of repetitive demand stream. Within certain periods of time, numerical examples have shown the cost performance of the policy obtained by our method compared to those by the Wagner‐Whitin algorithm.