 Optimal periodic flexible policies for two-stage serial supply chainsFang Liu and Srinagesh Gavirneni European Journal of Operational Research, 2018, vol. 268, issue 1, 148-160 Abstract: In a two-stage serial supply chain, a periodic flexible policy (PF policy) allows the retailer to receive fixed orders that may depend on demand history in one period of the ordering cycle and order freely in other periods. Existing literature has shown that certain PF policies can significantly reduce the inefficiency in a decentralized supply chain. However, these works have mostly defined and implemented ad-hoc periodic flexible policies and have not attempted to identify the optimal periodic flexible policies. In this paper, we characterize the structure of the optimal PF policy using calculus of variations. In particular, we show that under the optimal PF policy, the retailer receives shipments either according to a state dependent capacitated policy or a state dependent order up to policy. Furthermore, we can approximate the retailer’s optimal restricted ordering function by a piecewise linear function and show numerically that this approximation is near optimal. Keywords: Inventory; Periodic flexibility; Dynamic inventory system; Calculus of variations (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:268:y:2018:i:1:p:148-160 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.01.004 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier |
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