Newsvendor Bounds and Heuristic for Optimal Policies in Serial Supply Chains
Management Science
A Closed-Form Approximation for Serial Inventory Systems and Its Application to System Design
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Safety Stock Positioning in Supply Chains with Stochastic Lead Times
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Performance Evaluation and Stock Allocation in Capacitated Serial Supply Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Efficient heuristics for inventory placement in acyclic networks
Computers and Operations Research
Inventory Management with an Exogenous Supply Process
Operations Research
New model and heuristics for safety stock placement in general acyclic supply chain networks
Computers and Operations Research
Inventory placement in acyclic supply chain networks
Operations Research Letters
A new algorithm and a new heuristic for serial supply systems
Operations Research Letters
Lower Bounds and Heuristics for Supply Chain Stock Allocation
Operations Research
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
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This paper considers serial production-transportation systems. In recent years, researchers have developed a fairly simple functional equation that characterizes optimal system behavior, under the assumption of constant leadtimes. We show that the equation covers a variety of stochastic-leadtime systems as well. Still, many basic managerial issues remain obscure: When should stock be held at upstream stages? Which system attributes drive overall performance, and how? To address these questions, we develop and analyze several heuristic methods, inspired by observation of common practice and numerical experiments. One of these heuristics yields a bound on the optimal average cost. We also study a set of numerical examples, to gain insight into the nature of the optimal solution and to evaluate the heuristics.