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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/T08562/01
Title: Optimising replenishment & transshipment policies in multi-location inventory systems
Principal Investigator: Archibald, Professor T
Other Investigators:
Glazebrook, Professor KD
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Sch of Economics
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 10 January 2005 Ends: 09 January 2007 Value (£): 91,602
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Mathematical Aspects of OR
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Healthcare
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
The effective management of multi-location inventory systems is an important issue for many retail companies because it delivers reduced inventories and improved customer satisfaction. Although such systems have been the focus of considerable research effort, there is still a significant gap between existing mathematical models and the practical requirements of the retail industry. This research aims to develop new mathematical models and solution methods that close this gap. A major weakness of existing models is that they generally impose arbitrary restrictions on the number of locations and the timing of transshipment decisions to simplify the analysis. This research will develop stochastic dynamic programming models which impose no such restrictions. As these models will have high dimensional state spaces, solution methods will be developed using a variety of dimensionality reduction techniques including some which have proved effective in reservoir management and queuing control. These include aggregation, policy improvement and Lagrangian relaxations. In these methods decision making will be based on calibrations of the options via indices which are functions of a state variable of low dimension. Simulation will be used to compare the new methods with the static pooling policies that are often used in practice.
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