Managing transshipments in a multi-retailer system with approximate policies
研究了需求不确定下多零售商系统的转运策略，提出了简单且接近最优的启发式策略，并比较了不同策略的表现，发现某些启发式策略可能优于自利最优策略。
Using the right transshipment policy is important when transshipments are exercised under demand uncertainty. Optimal transshipment policy can be quite complex in a multi-firm system as optimal actions depend on all system variables. Moreover, both how to select requested retailer and how to respond to requests are in question. We introduce simple, close-to-optimal heuristic transshipment policies for multiple retailers. We first show that heuristic policies may perform even better than self-optimal policy, which is explained by Braess’s paradox. Then we test the performances of various heuristics with respect to centrally optimal policy. When retailers can observe others’ inventory levels, more effective transshipments can be made. Otherwise, a random selection performs quite well. We also observe that although always-accept respond policy is quite close to centrally optimal in small systems, the performance of pairwise-optimal holdback levels to respond requests is more clear and consistent for larger systems.