94%-Effective Policies for a Two-Stage Serial Inventory System with Stochastic Demand
研究两级串行库存系统，需求服从泊松分布，提出一种简单启发式策略，其长期平均成本保证在最优值的6%以内，即94%有效，并推广到更一般的系统。
A two-stage inventory system is considered where Poisson demand occurs at Stage 1, and Stage 1 replenishes its inventory from Stage 2, which in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock. Each shipment, either to Stage 2 or to Stage 1, incurs a fixed setup cost. Under the assumption that the supply leadtime at Stage 2 is zero, we characterize a simple heuristic policy whose long-run average cost is guaranteed to be within 6% of optimality, i.e., a 94%-effective policy. The paper also provides heuristic policies for more general inventory systems and reports computational results.