Integer Factorization: Why Two-Item Joint Replenishment Is Hard
通过整数分解框架，证明双物品联合补货问题的两个变体在计算上是困难的，其中一个变体甚至是NP完全的，这对库存管理中的协调决策有重要启示。
Joint replenishment problems constitute an important class of models in inventory management. They exhibit aspects of possible coordination among multiple products to save costs. Their computational complexity had been open even if there are just two products that need to be synced. In “Integer factorization: Why two-item joint replenishment is hard,” Schulz and Telha present a simple framework based on integer factorization to establish the computational hardness of two variants of the joint replenishment problem with two items. Whereas difficult to solve in practice and not believed to be solvable in polynomial time, integer factorization is not as difficult as NP-complete problems. The authors show that a similar technique can be used to show even the NP-completeness of one variant of the joint replenishment problem (again with just two items).