Benefits of leadtime information and of its combination with demand forecast information

This paper studies both the benefits of leadtime information and the interrelationships among demand forecast information, leadtime uncertainty, and leadtime information, for improving inventory control performance. To this end, it explicitly incorporates both leadtime information and demand forecast information into an inventory model although they have conventionally been dealt with individually in the literature. Specifically, it considers a periodic-review inventory model with uncertain leadtimes, in which both leadtime information and demand forecast information are available. The leadtime information is modeled as the information of the arrival of outstanding orders and the demand forecast information as the Martingale Model of Forecast Evolution (MMFE).