Title: A simulation-based approach for evaluating diverse inventory policies in a supply chain

Authors: Xie Xudong, Arun Kumar, Albert Wee Kwan Tan

Addresses: School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, RMIT University, 124 LaTrobe Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia. ' School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, RMIT University, 124 LaTrobe Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia. ' School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, RMIT University, 124 LaTrobe Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia

Abstract: Most of the current literature in supply chain inventory management focuses solely on series systems in which the analytical models become too complicated to be solved when considering various inventory policies concurrently. The authors present a new simulation-based approach to evaluate the inventory policies in a supply chain that analyses continuous and periodic review policies. Further, this paper proposes a combined performance measure, which considers total supply chain cost and customer service level using a case study. Based on the design of experiment, comparison is made on the impact of different configuration of inventory policies upon the combined performance measurement.

Keywords: supply chain management; SCM; inventory policies; DES; validation; t-testing comparison; discrete event simulation; inventory management; supply chain costs; customer service levels; performance measurement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2008.020610

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2008 Vol.4 No.1, pp.18 - 30

Published online: 03 Oct 2008 *

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