This book has a dual purpose?serving as an advanced textbook designed to prepare doctoral students to do research on the mathematical foundations of inventory theory, and as a reference work for those already engaged in such research. All chapters conclude with exercises that either solidify or extend the concepts introduced.
Optimal Control and Optimization of Stochastic Supply Chain Systems examines its subject the context of the presence of a variety of uncertainties. Numerous examples with intuitive illustrations and tables are provided, to demonstrate the structural characteristics of the optimal control policies in various stochastic supply chains and to show how to make use of these characteristics to construct easy-to-operate sub-optimal policies. In Part I, a general introduction to stochastic supply chain systems is provided. Analytical models for various stochastic supply chain systems are formulated and analysed in Part II. In Part III the structural knowledge of the optimal control policies obtained in Part II is utilized to construct easy-to-operate sub-optimal control policies for various stochastic supply chain systems accordingly. Finally, Part IV discusses the optimisation of threshold-type control policies and their robustness. A key feature of the book is its tying together of the complex analytical models produced by the requirements of operational practice, and the simple solutions needed for implementation. The analytical models and theoretical analysis propounded in this monograph will be of benefit to academic researchers and graduate students looking at logistics and supply chain management from standpoints in operations research or industrial, manufacturing, or control engineering. The practical tools and solutions and the qualitative insights into the ideas underlying functional supply chain systems will be of similar use to readers from more industrially-based backgrounds.
In the real world, production systems are affected by external and internal uncertainties. Stochastic demand - an external uncertainty - arises mainly due to forecast errors and unknown behavior of customers in future. Internal uncertainties occur in situations where random yield, random production capacity, or stochastic processing times affect the productivity of a manufacturing system. The resulting stochastic production output is especially present in industries with modern and complex technologies as the semiconductor industry. This thesis provides model formulations and solution methods for capacitated dynamic lot sizing problems with stochastic demand and stochastic production output that can be used by practitioners within Manufacturing Resource Planning Systems (MRP), Capacitated Production Planning Systems (CPPS), and Advanced Planning Systems (APS). In all models, backordered demand is controlled with service levels. Numerical studies compare the solution methods and give managerial implications in presence of stochastic production output. This book addresses practitioners, consultants, and developers as well as students, lecturers, and researchers with focus on lot sizing, production planning, and supply chain management.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management, AAIM 2022, which was held online during August 13-14, 2022. The conference was originally planned to take place in Guangzhou, China, but changed to a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 41 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions.
The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "This text is unique in bringing together so many results hitherto found only in part in other texts and papers. . . . The text is fairly self-contained, inclusive of some basic mathematical results needed, and provides a rich diet of examples, applications, and exercises. The bibliographical material at the end of each chapter is excellent, not only from a historical perspective, but because it is valuable for researchers in acquiring a good perspective of the MDP research potential." —Zentralblatt fur Mathematik ". . . it is of great value to advanced-level students, researchers, and professional practitioners of this field to have now a complete volume (with more than 600 pages) devoted to this topic. . . . Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming represents an up-to-date, unified, and rigorous treatment of theoretical and computational aspects of discrete-time Markov decision processes." —Journal of the American Statistical Association
