The literature on inventory control discusses many methods to establish the level of decision parameters -like reorder levels or safety factors-, necessary to attain a prescribed service level. In general, however, these methods are not easy applicable: they often use time-consuming iterations,...

This paper investigates the delay experienced by retailers in a distribution system due to shortages at the central warehouse. Simple formulae are developed to estimate the mean and variance of this delay. The formulae are based on replacing the stochastic lead-time demand with a stochastic...

We consider a production–inventory system with product returns that are announced in advance by the customers. Demands and announcements of returns occur according to independent Poisson processes. An announced return is either actually returned or cancelled after a random return lead time. We...

The awareness of importance of product recovery has grown swiftly in the past few decades. This paper focuses on a problem of inventory control and production planning optimisation of a generic type of an integrated Reverse Logistics (RL) network which consists of a traditional forward...