This third edition, which has been fully updated and now includes improved and extended explanations, is suitable as a core textbook as well as a source book for industry practitioners. It covers traditional approaches for forecasting, lot sizing, determination of safety stocks and reorder points, KANBAN policies and Material Requirements Planning. It also includes recent advances in inventory theory, for example, new techniques for multi-echelon inventory systems and Roundy's 98 percent approximation. The book also considers methods for coordinated replenishments of different items, and various practical issues in connection with industrial implementation. Other topics covered in Inventory Control include: alternative forecasting techniques, material on different stochastic demand processes and how they can be fitted to empirical data, generalized treatment of single-echelon periodic review systems, capacity constrained lot sizing, short sections on lateral transshipments and on remanufacturing, coordination and contracts. As noted, the explanations have been improved throughout the book and the text also includes problems, with solutions in an appendix.

This third edition, which has been fully updated and now includes improved and extended explanations, is suitable as a core textbook as well as a source book for industry practitioners. It covers traditional approaches for forecasting, lot sizing, determination of safety stocks and reorder points, KANBAN policies and Material Requirements Planning. It also includes recent advances in inventory theory, for example, new techniques for multi-echelon inventory systems and Roundy's 98 percent approximation. The book also considers methods for coordinated replenishments of different items, and various practical issues in connection with industrial implementation. Other topics covered in Inventory Control include: alternative forecasting techniques, material on different stochastic demand processes and how they can be fitted to empirical data, generalized treatment of single-echelon periodic review systems, capacity constrained lot sizing, short sections on lateral transshipments and on remanufacturing, coordination and contracts. As noted, the explanations have been improved throughout the book and the text also includes problems, with solutions in an appendix.

This paper treats a two-echelon inventory system. The higher echelon is a single location reffered to as the depot, which places orders for supply of a single com modity. The lower echelon consists of several points, called the retailers, which are supplied by shipments from the depot, and at which random demands for the item occur. Stocks are reviewed and decisions are made periodically. Orders and/or shipments may each require a fixed lead time before reaching their respective desti nations. Section II gives a short literature review of distribution research. Section III introduces the multi-echelon distribution system together with the underlying as sumptions and gives a description of how this problem can be viewed as a Markovian Decision Process. Section IV discusses the concept of cost modifications in a distribution context. Section V presents the test-examples together with their optimal solutions and also gives the characteristic properties of these optimal solutions. These properties then will be used in section VI to give adapted ver sions of various heuristics which were used in assembly experiments previously and which will be tested against the test-examples."