Coordinated Replenishments in a Multi-Item Inventory System with Compound Poisson Demands

In many practical applications or multi-item inventory systems significant economies of scale can be exploited when coordinating replenishment orders for groups of items. This paper considers a continuous review multi-item inventory system with compound Poisson demand processes; excess demands are b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inManagement science Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 344 - 357
Main Authors Federgruen, A, Groenevelt, H, Tijms, H. C
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Linthicum INFORMS 01.03.1984
Institute of Management Sciences
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
SeriesManagement Science
Subjects
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Summary:In many practical applications or multi-item inventory systems significant economies of scale can be exploited when coordinating replenishment orders for groups of items. This paper considers a continuous review multi-item inventory system with compound Poisson demand processes; excess demands are backlogged and each replenishment requires a lead time. There is a major setup cost associated with any replenishment of the family of items, and a minor (item dependent) setup cost when including a particular item in this replenishment. Moreover there are holding and penalty costs. We present an algorithm which searches for a simple coordinated control rule minimizing the long-run average cost per unit time subject to a service level constraint per item on the fraction of demand satisfied directly from on-hand inventory. This algorithm is based on a heuristic decomposition procedure and a specialized policy-iteration method to solve the single-item subproblems generated by the decomposition procedure. The model applies to multi-location inventory systems with similar cost structures for coordinated deliveries.
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ISSN:0025-1909
1526-5501
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.30.3.344