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...

Traditional newsvendor models usually focus on single profit maximization or cost minimization approaches. However, making a monetary estimate of the consequences of lost sales as a result of shortages is often a difficult task for many practitioners. Besides, there is still a lack of an...

In managing an inventory network, two approaches to the pooling of stock have been proposed. Reactive transshipments respond to shortages at a location by moving inventory from elsewhere within the network, while proactive stock redistribution seeks to minimize the chance of future stockouts....

This paper presents an up-to-date review of the advances made in the field of inventory control of perishable items (deteriorating inventory). The last extensive review on this topic dates back to 2001 (Goyal S.K. and Giri B.C., Recent trends in modeling of deteriorating inventory, European...

In this article a single item inventory model with backlogging is analyzed, which is a generalization of the most well-known simple models. This formulation enables us to separate the analysis of the system to the analysis of the control rule (reduced to the analysis of a Markov chain) and of...

Organizations with large-scale inventory systems typically have a large proportion of items for which demand is intermittent and low volume. We examine different approaches to forecasting for such products, paying particular attention to the need for inventory planning over a multi-period...

Product returns are often characterized by a dual uncertainty on time and quantity. In the literature on inventory management with product returns, best forecasts have been associated with methods that use the most informationregarding product return history. In practice however, data is often...