A simple heuristic for echelon policies in serial supply chains

✍ Scribed by Kevin H. Shang; Sean X. Zhou

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 884 KB
• Volume: 37
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-6377
• DOI: 10.1016/j.orl.2009.08.003

✦ Synopsis

This paper proposes a simple heuristic that generates a solution for echelon (r, nQ , T ) policies by sequentially solving a deterministic demand problem, a subproblem with fixed reorder intervals, and a subproblem with fixed batch sizes. For each of these problems, we further simplify the computation by solving a series of single-stage systems whose parameters are obtained directly from the original problem data. In a numerical study, we find that this heuristic outperforms an existing one in the literature.