We investigate how to improve the performance of a supply chain, in which each location has only local information and replenishes its inventory in fixed time intervals. To model such a supply chain, we consider a serial inventory system with local (s,T) policies. Two strategies are considered:
1) expanding the information flow by acquiring real-time demand information;
and 2) accelerating the material flow via responsive deliveries. We show that comparing costs in these scenarios is equivalent to comparing costs between the local (s,T) policy and two other well-studied inventory policies, namely, the echelon (s,T) and the continuous-review local (r,Q) policies.

报告人简介：

        Sean Zhou received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China in 2001 and his Master and Ph.D. in Operations Research from North Carolina State University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He joined the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor in July 2006. His main research area is supply chain management, more specifically, inventory theory, production planning, game theoretic applications.