Fall 2008 Seminar Series

DATE: November 6, 2008
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC ConferenceRoom, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Paul Zipkin

TITLE
A Multi-Source Inventory System with Order Tracking and Expediting

ABSTRACT
We consider an inventory system with multiple supply sources and expediting options. The replenishment leadtimes from each supply source are stochastic, representing congestion and disruption. We develop performance evaluation tools for a family of reasonable ordering and expediting policies that take into account real-time supply information, which can be obtained through tracking technologies such as GPS and RFID. Performance evaluation of such state-dependent policies is generally hard. The main thrust of the paper is to show that, under these policies, the supply system becomes a network of queues with a special routing mechanism called an overflow bypass. The solution has a simple product form. Thus, we obtain closed-form performance measures.