Traditionally, lot sizing decisions in inventory management trade-off the cost of placing orders against the cost of holding inventory. However, when these lot sizes are to be produced in a finite capacity production/inventory system, the lot size has an important impact on the lead times, which...

We provide a novel approach to characterize the order process of continuous review (s,S) and (r,nQ) inventory policies, and study the impact of the batching parameter (the value of Q or S-s) on the variability in the order process. First, we characterize the distribution of the time between...

We consider a supply chain in which orders and lead times are linked endogenously, as opposed to assuming lead times are exogenous. This assumption is relevant when a retailer’s orders are produced by a supplier with finite capacity and replenished when the order is completed. The retailer...

We consider a two-echelon supply chain where a single retailer holds an inventory of finished goods to satisfy an i.i.d. customer demand, and a single manufacturer produces the retailer's replenishment orders on a make-to-order basis. The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of the...

An important supply chain research problem is the bullwhip effect: demand fluctuations increase as one moves up the supply chain from retailer to manufacturer. It has been recognized that demand forecasting and ordering policies are two of the key causes of the bullwhip effect. In this paper we...

Supply chain collaboration creates a gain (a surplus) compared to uncoordinated or disconnected supply chain policies. In this paper we review policies to allocate the “gain” to supply chain members so that each firm’s objective becomes aligned with the supply chain’s objective. In other...

In this paper, we describe a link between Markovian binary trees (MBT) and tree-like quasi-birth-and-death processes (TLQBD) by associating a specific TLQBD to each MBT. The algorithms to compute the matrices Gk in the TLQBD then correspond to the algorithms calculating the extinction...

In this paper we introduce the adaptive MMAP[K] arrival process and analyze the adaptive MMAP[K]/PH[K]/1 queue. In such a queueing system, customers of K different types with Markovian inter-arrival times and possibly correlated customer types, are fed to a single server queue that makes use of...