Approximation Approaches for Inventory Systems with General Production/Ordering Cost Structures
针对实践中复杂生产/订货成本结构导致最优策略难以实施的问题，提出了几种易于实施且高效的启发式策略，并利用K-近似凸性概念建立了最坏情况性能界限，数值实验表明最佳策略表现极好。
The production/ordering cost structure is fundamental to determining an optimal inventory control policy. For example, it is well known that a base‐stock policy is optimal for inventory systems with linear production costs, whereas an ( s, S) policy is optimal if both linear and fixed costs exist. However, many of the cost structures that have arisen from the practice are quite complex and make the optimal policies too complicated for managers to implement. In this study, we propose several easy‐to‐implement and efficient heuristic policies for inventory systems with general production costs, which include multiple linear pieces and fixed costs, suggesting a wide application to many practical problems that were previously difficult to solve. We establish the worst‐case performance bounds on the proposed heuristic policies by using the concept of K‐approximate convexity. Our extensive numerical studies, which are designed to reflect practical inventory control applications, evaluate the performance of the heuristic policies and show that the best heuristic policy we propose performs extremely well. We also try to provide explanations for the performance of different heuristic policies.