Dual Sourcing in an Assembly System: A Simple and Effective Critical-Set Base-Surge Policy

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Deng, Tianhu; Shao, Feiyu; Song, Jing-Sheng Jeannette; Yu, Yi
• 署名单位: Soochow University - China; Tsinghua University; Duke University; Shanghai University of Finance & Economics
• 刊物名称: OPERATIONS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0030-364X
• DOI: 10.1287/opre.2023.0411
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: additive separability; assembly systems; Asymptotic Optimality; Critical-Set Base-Surge policy; dual-sourcing; inventory; optimality

摘要

To enhance supply chain resilience, assembly manufacturers increasingly adopt dual-sourcing strategies, utilizing both regular and faster but costlier express sources for each key component. Although research has focused on single-item systems, coordinating dual-sourced orders across multiple components in an assembly system remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel Critical-Set Base-Surge (CSBS) policy, which combines a constant order policy for regular sources to meet base demand with a Critical-Set (CS) policy for express sources to handle surge demand. Under the CS policy, only components within a critical set are replenished from the express sources, raising their net inventory levels to a common threshold. By uncovering a weaker form of additive separability and demonstrating the exponential convergence of states under the CSBS policy, we establish a theoretical bound on its performance and demonstrate its asymptotic optimality as regular lead times increase. The results can be extended to settings where only a subset of components is dual-sourced. Numerical experiments show that, compared with benchmark policies that apply the Tailored Base-Surge policy, the CSBS policy achieves substantial optimality gap reductions. Furthermore, we propose a CSBS policy with easy-to-compute parameters and demonstrate that it delivers performance comparable with the CSBS policy.