Online Demand Fulfillment Under Limited Flexibility
研究了有限灵活性网络中在线需求履行问题，证明了稀疏网络能保证与完全灵活性网络相当的性能，并提出了简单的库存分配规则和网络设计指南。
We study online demand fulfillment in a class of networks with limited flexibility and arbitrary numbers of resources and request types. We show analytically that such a network is both necessary and sufficient to guarantee a performance gap independent of the market size compared with networks with full flexibility, extending the previous literature from the long chains to more general sparse networks. Inspired by the performance bound, we develop simple inventory allocation rules and guidelines for designing such network structures. Numerical experiments including one using some real data from Amazon China are conducted to confirm our findings as well as some of the flexibility principles conjectured in the literature. This paper was accepted by Chung Piaw Teo, optimization.