Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) and consignment inventory (CI) are supply-chain sourcing practices between a vendor and customer. VMI allows the vendor to initiate orders on behalf of the customer. This presumably benefits the vendor who can then make replenishment decisions according to her own...

This paper addresses a hub-and-spoke network problem for railroad freight, where a central planner is to find transport routes, frequency of service, length of trains to be used, and transportation volume. Hub-and-spoke networks, often found in air freight, have not been favoured by railways in...

This paper obtains the optimal routings for intermodal containerized transport from Canada to Mexico. Such traffic is being stimulated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but the cost and lead times of feasible routes are not well known. We summarize the links and routes to...

We formulate a stochastic-demand version of the single-stage lot-sizing problem with time-varying demand, incorporating a service-level constraint on the probability of a stockout. Three strategies are studied. The "static uncertainty" strategy, in which lot-sizing decisions for every period...

Consider a family of SKUs for which the supplier will offer a quantity discount, according to the aggregate purchases of the product group. Management of those items is based on the modified periodic policy. From the supplier's point of view, what are the optimal parameters (breakpoint and...

Most studies on supply chain management have taken an "inventory" point of view: The chain, supplier--manufacturer--majormanufacturer, is thus analyzed as a series of production-inventory decisions. Although correct, that approach neglects issues on the transportation between nodes, thereby...