Collaborative Inventory Control Policies in Supply Chains

Abstract

The inventory control is a critical problem of the management of supplier companies for several decades. In recent years numerous new supply chain and inventory control models have been developed to support management decisions. In this paper, we investigate the classical one-customer and one-supplier problem with an analytical, event oriented model. Our basic aim is to determine an optimal inventory holding and production policy for suppliers, which means determining of an optimal and a critical inventory stocklevel. The expected (average) cost of supplier using the optimal policy will be minimized under stochastic customer demands. We examine this problem by means of an own simulation method and analysis of the results will also be discussed.