Inventory management with advance capacity information

An important aspect of supply chain management is dealing with demand and supply uncertainty. The uncertainty of future supply can be reduced if a company is able to obtain advance capacity information (ACI) about future supply/production capacity availability from its supplier. We address a periodic‐review inventory system under stochastic demand and stochastic limited supply, for which ACI is available. We show that the optimal ordering policy is a state‐dependent base‐stock policy characterized by a base‐stock level that is a function of ACI. We establish a link with inventory models that use advance demand information (ADI) by developing a capacitated inventory system with ADI, and we show that equivalence can only be set under a very specific and restrictive assumption, implying that ADI insights will not necessarily hold in the ACI environment. Our numerical results reveal several managerial insights. In particular, we show that ACI is most beneficial when there is sufficient flexibility to react to anticipated demand and supply capacity mismatches. Further, most of the benefits can be achieved with only limited future visibility. We also show that the system parameters affecting the value of ACI interact in a complex way and therefore need to be considered in an integrated manner. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011     

金刚石车床上带固态执行器的微定位装置——一个初步实验

在超精密设计中,很可能没有可供选择的设计方案。在超精细进给情况下,压电执行器是一种潜在选择。目前,欧洲和日本刀具制造商为此正致力于磁致伸缩执行器的研究。压电材料和磁致伸缩材料都存在磁滞型非线性,以致这些系统的输出依赖于以前的输入,绝对定位仅通过反馈控制才能得到。本文采用模拟技术对脆性材料的超精密加工中(微米级)刀架定位的几种现代控制技术作了一番比较。