THE JOINT REPLENISHMENT PROBLEM WITH GENERAL JOINT COST STRUCTURES
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
FEDERGRUEN, A; ZHENG, YS
署名单位：
University of Pennsylvania
刊物名称：
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
ISSN/ISSBN：
0030-364X
DOI：
10.1287/opre.40.2.384
发表日期：
1992
页码：
384-403
关键词：
摘要：
We consider inventory systems with several distinct items. Demands occur at constant, item specific rates. The items are interdependent because of jointly incurred fixed procurement costs: The joint cost structure reflects general economies of scale, merely assuming a monotonicity and concavity (submodularity) property. Under a power-of-two policy each item is replenished with constant reorder intervals which are power-of-two multiples of some fixed or variable base planning period. Our main results include a proof that, depending upon whether the base planning period is fixed or variable, the best among all power-of-two policies has an average cost which comes within either 6% or 2% of an easily computable lower bound for the minimum cost value. We also derive two efficient algorithms to compute an optimal power-of-two policy. The proposed algorithms generate as a by-product, a specific cost allocation of the joint cost structure to the individual items. With this specific allocation, the problem with separable costs is in fact equivalent to the original problem with nonseparable joint costs in the sense that the two problems share the same sets of optimal power-of-two policies with identical associated long-run average costs.