Lower Bound Heuristic for Selecting Multi-Item Inventories for a General Job Completion Objective

摘要

When an inventory of multiple items is used to support the completion of an overall job or mission, commonly used inventory service level measures which are defined in terms of item availability are not appropriate. This paper develops a general model for problems of this type in which item demands are also interdependent. A heuristic model is derived for determining stock levels that are guaranteed to satisfy the given inventory system performance objective, but at a slightly higher cost than would be achieved by the true optimum. (SDW)