Consider a central depot (or plant) which supplies several locations experiencing random demands. Orders are placed (or production is initiated) periodically by the depot. The order arrives after a fixed lead time, and is then allocated among the several locations. (The depot itself does not...

We have an inventory to manage. The scenario is standard in all respects save one. Instead of arriving unannounced, customers provide advance warning of their demands. How should we use this information, and what is its effect on system performance? The answers turn out to be strikingly simple....

We argue that standard approximations for two often-used inventory service-level measures may perform poorly in many situations. Then we confirm the long-standing conjecture that the (relatively) exact formulas for these quantities are convex functions of the relevant control variables. Both...

Information about delays can enhance service quality in many industries. Delay information can take many forms, with different degrees of precision. Different levels of information have different effects on customers and therefore on the overall system. To explore these effects, we consider a...

This paper has two purposes. The first is purely expository: to introduce stochastic interest-rate models and security-evaluation methods in a simple mathematical setting. Specifically, we assume the uncertainties in the model are represented by a discrete-time, finite-state Markov chain....

This paper is concerned with multiechelon inventory systems, where each demand triggers a separate order (one-for-one replenishment policies). The exogenous demands are independent Poisson processes. The transit times between locations may be stochastic. The way we model these transit times...

Consider an inventory system with multiple supply sources and Poisson demand. The replenishment lead times from each source are stochastic, representing congestion and disruption. We develop performance evaluation and optimization tools for a family of reasonable order policies. These policies...

We show that certain large, multiproduct problems can be well approximated by smaller models of the same form, representing only one aggregate product (or a few such products). This reduction follows from a new technique to approximate the minimal cost of a special allocation or "disaggregation"...

We consider an infinite-horizon in problem with stochastic demands where the data vary periodically. Karlin (Karlin, S. 1960a. Dynamic inventory policy with varying stochastic demands. Management Sci. 6 231--258; Karlin, S. 1960b. Optimal policy for dynamic inventory process with stochastic demands...

In this paper we discuss stochastic Economic Lot Scheduling Problems (ELSP), i.e., settings where several items need to be produced in a common facility with limited capacity, under significant uncertainty regarding demands, production times, setup times, or combinations thereof. We propose a...