An inherent differentiation and system level assessment approach to inventory management

Construction and optimization of inventory management system via cloud-edge collaborative computing in supply chain environment in the Internet of Things era

The present work aims to strengthen the core competitiveness of industrial enterprises in the supply chain environment, and enhance the efficiency of inventory management and the utilization rate of inventory resources. First, an analysis is performed on the supply and demand relationship between suppliers and manufacturers in the supply chain environment and the production mode of intelligent plant based on cloud manufacturing. It is found that the efficient management of spare parts inventory can effectively reduce costs and improve service levels. On this basis, different prediction methods are proposed for different data types of spare parts demand, which are all verified. Finally, the inventory management system based on cloud-edge collaborative computing is constructed, and the genetic algorithm is selected as a comparison to validate the performance of the system reported here. The experimental results indicate that prediction method based on weighted summation of eigenvalues and fitting proposed here has the smallest error and the best fitting effect in the demand prediction of machine spare parts, and the minimum error after fitting is only 2.2%. Besides, the spare parts demand prediction method can well complete the prediction in the face of three different types of time series of spare parts demand data, and the relative error of prediction is maintained at about 10%. This prediction system can meet the basic requirements of spare parts demand prediction and achieve higher prediction accuracy than the periodic prediction method. Moreover, the inventory management system based on cloud-edge collaborative computing has shorter processing time, higher efficiency, better stability, and better overall performance than genetic algorithm. The research results provide reference and ideas for the application of edge computing in inventory management, which have certain reference significance and application value.

Operations research models and methods for safety stock determination: A review

•A review on operations research (OR) models and methods for safety stock determination is conducted. •No work has yet systematized research focusing on the safety stock determination problem. •Articles are classified and discussed regarding the modeling approach, industrial application, solution technique and main performance criteria used. •Research opportunities, promising research directions and trends are identified.

In supply chain inventory management it is generally accepted that safety stocks are a suitable strategy to deal with demand and supply uncertainty aiming to prevent inventory stock-outs. Safety stocks have been the subject of intensive research, typically covering the problems of dimensioning, positioning, managing and placement. Here, we narrow the scope of the discussion to the safety stock dimensioning problem, consisting in determining the proper safety stock level for each product. This paper reports the results of a recent in-depth systematic literature review (SLR) of operations research (OR) models and methods for dimensioning safety stocks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic review of the application of OR-based approaches to investigate this problem. A set of 95 papers published from 1977 to 2019 has been reviewed to identify the type of model being employed, as well as the modeling techniques and main performance criteria used. At the end, we highlight current literature gaps and discuss potential research directions and trends that may help to guide researchers and practitioners interested in the development of new OR-based approaches for safety stock determination.