Mathematical Models of Retailer Inventory Systems: A Review

摘要: Retail inventory management is an important and challenging research area. Based on performance measures such as turns per year, the efficiency with which retailers manage their lags well behind other sectors, manufacturing. However, retail must deal unique problems complexities. By nature of business, major hold stock at many geographically dispersed locations anywhere from several hundred to thousands stores for typical retailing chain. Retailers are also faced problem managing extremely large number line items; thousand SKUs (stock keeping units) not uncommon. Until recently, demand rates store level have been reported only in aggregate form, often considerable delay inaccuracy. This made it nearly impossible accurately determine position SKU a store, let alone estimate probability distribution weekly or service experienced by customers individual items.