• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.125-138
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• 2006

This paper considers a periodic review, two-echelon inventory system with one central warehouse and several re-tailers facing normally distributed demand. The goal is to attain target fill rates, while the systemwide total holding costs are minimized. An important aspect of this problem is material rationing in the case of shortages. If a central warehouse has insufficient inventory to deliver all replenishment orders to retailers, all order quantities are should be adjusted according to some rationing rule. A simple but efficient rationing rule is proposed and compared with the Balanced Stock (BS) rationing as introduced by Heijden which is known to be the best rationing policy in the literature. Numerical results show that the proposed rationing rule is more cost effective than BS rationing, especially for the differences in holding costs between retailers are large.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.89-97
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• 2012

This paper considers a manufacturer with a two-station make-to-stock and make-to-order serial production system. The MTS facility produces a single type of component and provides components for the MTO facility that produces customized products. In addition to the internal demand from the MTO facility, the MTS facility faces demands from the spot market with the option of to accept or reject each incoming demand. This paper addresses a joint component inventory rationing and batch production control which maximizes the manufacturer's profit. Using the Markov decision process model, we investigate the structural properties of the optimal inventory rationing and batch production policy, and present two types of heuristics. We implement a numerical experiment to compare the performance of the optimal and heuristic policies and a simulation study to examine the impact of the stochastic process variability on the inventory rationing and batch production control.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.80-92
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• 2009

This paper addresses the inventory rationing issue embedded in the regional supply chain inventory replenishment problem (RSIRP). The concerned supply chain, which was fed by the national supply chain, consisted of a single warehouse distributing a single product to multiple stores (M-stores) with independent and normally distributed customer demand. It was assumed that the supply chain operated under the order-up-to level inventory replenishment system and had only one truck at the regional warehouse. The truck could make one replenishment trip to one store per period (a round trip per period). Based on current inventories and the vehicle constraint, the warehouse must make two decisions in each period: which store in the region to replenish and what was the replenishment quantity? The objective was to position inventories so as to minimize lost sales in the region. The warehouse inventory was replenished in every fixed-interval from a source outside the region, but the store inventory could be replenished daily. The truck destination (store) in each period was selected based on its maximum expected shortage. The replenishment quantity was then determined based on the predetermined order-up-to level system. In case of insufficient warehouse inventories to fulfill all projected store demands, an inventory rationing rule must be applied. In this paper, a new inventory rationing rule named Expected Cost Minimization (ECM) was proposed based on the practical purpose. The numerical results based on real data from a selective industry show that its performance was better and more robust than the current practice and other sharing rules in the existing literature.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.45-56
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• 2012

This paper considers a supply chain consisting of a component manufacturer and a product manufacturer. The component manufacturer provides components for the product manufacturer based on a vendor-managed inventory type of supply contract, and also faces demands from the market with the option of to accept or reject each incoming demand. Using the Markov decision process model, we examine the structure of the optimal production control and inventory rationing policy. Two types of heuristics are presented. One is the fixed-buffer policy and the other uses two linear functions. We implement a computational study and present managerial insights based on the observations.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.447-452
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• 2015

This paper considers a two-stage make-to-stock production system. The first stage produces a single-component and the second stage produces a make-to-stock product using components. In addition to internal demands, the first stage faces external demands with the option of accepting or rejecting. To ration component inventory, the manufacturer adopts a static rule. This paper analyzes the production controls at both facilities that maximizes the manufacturer's profit. Using the Markov decision process model, we characterize the optimal production policy by two monotonic switching curves.