A perishable item is one that has constant utility up until an expiration date (which may be known or uncertain), at which point the utility drops to zero. This includes many types of packaged foods such as milk, cheese, processed meats, and canned goods. It also includes virtually all pharmaceuticals and photographic film, as well as whole blood supplies. This book is the first devoted solely to perishable inventory systems. The book’s ten chapters first cover the preliminaries of periodic review versus continuous review and look at a one-period newsvendor perishable inventory model. The author moves to the basic multiperiod dynamic model, and then considers the extensions of random lifetime, inclusion of a set-up cost, and multiproduct models of perishables. A chapter on continuous review models looks at one-for-one policies, models with zero lead time, optimal policies with positive lead time, and an alternative approach. Additional chapters present material on approximate order policies, inventory depletion management, and deterministic models, including the basic EOQ model with perishability and the dynamic deterministic model with perishability. Finally, chapters explore decaying inventories, queues with impatient customers, and blood bank inventory control. Anyone researching perishable inventory systems will find much to work with here. Practitioners and consultants will also now have a single well-referenced source of up-to-date information to work with.

This book addresses the challenging task of demand forecasting and inventory management in retailing. It analyzes how information from point-of-sale scanner systems can be used to improve inventory decisions, and develops a data-driven approach that integrates demand forecasting and inventory management for perishable products, while taking unobservable lost sales and substitution into account in out-of-stock situations. Using linear programming, a new inventory function that reflects the causal relationship between demand and external factors such as price and weather is proposed. The book subsequently demonstrates the benefits of this new approach in numerical studies that utilize real data collected at a large European retail chain. Furthermore, the book derives an optimal inventory policy for a multi-product setting in which the decision-maker faces an aggregated service level target, and analyzes whether the decision-maker is subject to behavioral biases based on real data for bakery products.

In two volumes, Planning Production and Inventories in the Extended Enterprise: A State of the Art Handbook examines production planning across the extended enterprise against a backdrop of important gaps between theory and practice. The early chapters describe the multifaceted nature of production planning problems and reveal many of the core complexities. The middle chapters describe recent research on theoretical techniques to manage these complexities. Accounts of production planning system currently in use in various industries are included in the later chapters. Throughout the two volumes there are suggestions on promising directions for future work focused on closing the gaps.

Decision-making is an important task no matter the industry. Operations research, as a discipline, helps alleviate decision-making problems through the extraction of reliable information related to the task at hand in order to come to a viable solution. Integrating stochastic processes into operations research and management can further aid in the decision-making process for industrial and management problems. Stochastic Processes and Models in Operations Research emphasizes mathematical tools and equations relevant for solving complex problems within business and industrial settings. This research-based publication aims to assist scholars, researchers, operations managers, and graduate-level students by providing comprehensive exposure to the concepts, trends, and technologies relevant to stochastic process modeling to solve operations research problems.

ThisvolumecontainstheproceedingsoftheInternetofThings(IOT)Conference 2008, the ?rst international conference of its kind. The conference took place in Zurich,Switzerland, March26–28,2008. The term ‘Internet of Things’ hascome to describe a number of technologies and researchdisciplines that enable the - ternet to reach out into the real world of physical objects. Technologies such as RFID, short-range wireless communications, real-time localization, and sensor networks are becoming increasingly common, bringing the ‘Internet of Things’ into industrial, commercial, and domestic use. IOT 2008 brought together le- ing researchersand practitioners, from both academia and industry, to facilitate the sharing of ideas, applications, and research results. IOT 2008 attracted 92 high-quality submissions, from which the technical program committee accepted 23 papers, resulting in a competitive 25% acc- tance rate. In total, there were over 250 individual authors from 23 countries, representing both academic and industrial organizations. Papers were selected solely on the quality of their blind peer reviews. We were fortunate to draw on the combined experience of our 59 program committee members, coming from the most prestigious universities and research labs in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. Program committee members were aided by no less than 63 external reviewers in this rigorous process, in which each committee member wrote about 6 reviews. The total of 336 entered reviews resulted in an average of 3. 7 reviews per paper, or slightly more than 1000 words of feedback for each paper submitted.

This book presents a compilation of over 200 numerical problems and solutions that students can use to learn, practice and master the Inventory Control and Management concepts. Intended as a companion to any of the standard textbooks in Inventory Control and Management and written in simple language, it illustrates very clearly the steps students need to follow in order to solve a given problem. It also explains which solution methodologies can be used under which circumstances. Offering an ideal one-stop resource for mid-level engineering and business students who have taken Inventory Management or a related subject as an elective, this book is the only one students will ever need to prepare and gain confidence for their examinations in this subject.

The goal of Inventory Management will be to explain the dynamics of inventory management's principles, concepts, and techniques as they relate to the entire supply chain (customer demand, distribution, and product transformation processes). The interrelationships of all functions will be defined. The book concentrates on understanding the many ramifications of inventory management. In today's competitive business environment, inventory management has proven to be most critical, and this book is directed to the management of inventory to assist in better understanding the body of knowledge required to operate in a competitive world. Almost all functions such as sales, engineering, and accounting have an impact and are impacted by inventory management. The book will assist in the training of students as well as APICS CPIM (Certified in Production and Inventory Management) candidates. As such it will not only be a textbook, but also a desk reference for those employees responsible for controlling inventories, and thereby assist in reducing cost, improving customer service, and maximizing capacity. Each chapter concludes with a case study and suggested solution. The case studies tell the story of a growing company, Smith Industries, and the related inventory management problems it had to address. The problems addressed relate to the subject matter of the chapter.