Assemble-to-Order Systems

We review the recent academic literature on Assemble-to-Order (ATO) systems, which stock inventory of components that are then assembled into final products upon receipt of customer demand. The key feature of such systems, component commonality (i.e., products may share common components), provides benefits from inventory pooling, but also complicates replenishment and allocation decisions. Hence, much academic research has been devoted to optimizing these decisions, which we review for both one-period and dynamic models. We provide brief overviews of the traditional literature and emphasize the details of recent advances not covered in the previous reviews. We conclude with several promising directions for future research, including applications to online resource allocation, e-retailing, system design, and pricing