Periodic Versus “Can-Order” Policies for Coordinated Multi-Item Inventory Systems
针对多物品库存协调问题，提出一种新的最优策略成本下界，并基于此设计了一种简单的定期策略，在多个数据集上优于传统的“可订购”策略。
The coordinated multi-item inventory problem refers to the problem of managing inventories where there is a joint fixed cost for replenishing plus an item-by-item fixed cost for each item included in the replenishment order. Given that the optimal solution is likely to be too complex, attention has focused on fixed heuristics, and in particular ‘can-order’ or (s, c, S) policies. This paper makes two contributions. First, a new lower bound on the cost of the optimal policy is proposed in order that the performance of heuristics may be measured. Second, motivated by the lower bound, a simple periodic policy is proposed and shown to be an improvement over ‘can-order’ policies for many data sets.