Research Initiation: Multiproduct Inventory Models with Demand Substitution

在制造业、经销业和服务业中，需求替代在实践中很常见。向下替代结构出现的一个例子是钢铁工业，在该行业中，强度较高的钢梁可以取代强度较低的梁。这个项目将开发一个通用的框架，它识别最优策略的属性和有效的算法，以计算大规模和现实生活中的最优策略。直接涉及需求替代问题的研究很少，而且大多只涉及两种产品的具体情况。这些模型和求解技术对于解决汽车租赁行业中的安全库存位置、向客户分配卡以及航空业的收益问题等各种问题都很有用。

Demand substitutions are common in practice, in the manufacturing, distributions and service industries. An example where downward substitution structure arises is the steel industry where steel beams of greater strength can substitute for beams of lesser strength. This project will develop a general framework which identifies properties of the optimal policies and efficient algorithms to calculate the optimal policies for large size and real life problems. There are few studies that deal directly with the problem of demand substitutions, and most of them deal with only the specific case of two products. The models and solution techniques are useful in solving a variety of problems like safety stock locations, and allocations of cards to customers in the car rental industry, and the yield problem in the airline industry.