The effect of lead time and demand uncertainties in (r, q) inventory systems

Abstract

We study a single-item (r, q) inventory system, where r is the reorder point and q is the order quantity. The demand is a compound-Poisson process. We investigate the behavior of the optimal policy parameters and the long-run average cost of the system in response to stochastically shorter or less-variable lead times. We show that although some of the properties of the base-stock system can be extended to this more general model, some cannot. The same findings also apply when the comparison is conducted on the lead-time demand distributions. © 2010 INFORMS.