Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Volume 54, Issue 20, Pages 6174-6191Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2015.1082669
Keywords
inventory control; queueing networks; supply chain dynamics; Markovian analysis; separability; product form stationary distribution
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We consider a two-echelon production-inventory system with a central supplier connected to production systems ( servers) at several locations, each with a local inventory. Demand of customers arrives at each production system according to a Poisson process and is lost if the local inventory is depleted. To satisfy a customer's demand, a server at the production system takes exactly one unit of rawmaterial from the associated local inventory. The central supplier manufactures rawmaterial to replenish the local inventories, which are controlled by a continuous review base stock policy. We derive stationary distributions of joint queue length and inventory processes in explicit product form. After performing a cost analysis, we find out that the global search for the vector of optimal base stock levels can be reduced to a set of independent optimisation problems. The explicit form of the stationary distribution enables us to get additional structural insights, e.g. about monotonicity properties and stability conditions. Obtaining the product form relies on some simplifying assumptions. The results are therefore compared with simulations of a more realistic system, which supports to use it as approximation.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available