Tandem queues with planned inventories
Operations Research
Lower bounds for multi-echelon stochastic inventory systems
Management Science
Stock Positioning and Performance Estimation in Serial Production-Transportation Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Newsvendor Bounds and Heuristic for Optimal Policies in Serial Supply Chains
Management Science
Fill Rates of Single-Stage and Multistage Supply Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Inventory control in a decentralised two-stage make-to-stock queueing system
International Journal of Systems Science - Production Coordination and Inventory Policies
A performance evaluation model by integrating fuzzy AHP and fuzzy TOPSIS methods
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
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We develop an approximation scheme for performance evaluation of serial supply systems when each stage operates like a single-server queue, and its planned inventories are managed according to a base-stock policy. We also present a near-exact matrix-geometric procedure for benchmarking our approximation relative to two other methods proposed in the literature. Through numerical tests, we demonstrate that our method is superior, both for performance estimation and for policy parameter optimization. Using this technique, we then perform experiments that address the following issues. What proportion of the optimal total inventory should managers allocate to upstream production stages to minimize the sum of inventory and backorder costs? If managerial action could lower holding cost rate or add capacity, which stages of the supply system should be targeted for maximum net benefit? Such concerns have been the subject of several recent studies relating to supply networks with constant and random independent lead times. We shine light on optimal actions for serial supply systems that experience congestion.