IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/eujine/v2y2008i4p479-491.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On the choice of a demand distribution for inventory management models

Author

Listed:
  • Katrien Ramaekers
  • Gerrit K. Janssens

Abstract

An inventory system containing uncertainty, e.g., in demand, in costs, in lead time, or in supplied quantity or quality, needs a probability distribution of demand for reorder point models. In the literature on inventory control, many times reference is made to the Normal or Gamma distribution for describing the demand in the lead time. The Poisson distribution has been found to provide a reasonable fit when the demand is very low. However, information about the functional form of the probability distribution is often incomplete in practice. For example, it might be that only the first moments of the probability distribution are known. This incomplete information is a problem as the shape of the distribution is important in terms of the performance of inventory control. A procedure is described to determine shape characteristics when only the first two moments of the distribution of demand during the lead time are known, using a compound Poisson distribution and the Pearson chart. [Received 18 August 2006; Revised 15 November 2007; Accepted 11 February 2008]

Suggested Citation

  • Katrien Ramaekers & Gerrit K. Janssens, 2008. "On the choice of a demand distribution for inventory management models," European Journal of Industrial Engineering, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 2(4), pages 479-491.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:eujine:v:2:y:2008:i:4:p:479-491
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=18441
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bruzda, Joanna, 2019. "Quantile smoothing in supply chain and logistics forecasting," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 208(C), pages 122-139.
    2. Escalona, P. & Ordóñez, F. & Marianov, V., 2015. "Joint location-inventory problem with differentiated service levels using critical level policy," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 141-157.
    3. Ulrich, Matthias & Jahnke, Hermann & Langrock, Roland & Pesch, Robert & Senge, Robin, 2022. "Classification-based model selection in retail demand forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 209-223.
    4. Bruzda, Joanna, 2020. "Demand forecasting under fill rate constraints—The case of re-order points," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1342-1361.
    5. Chan, Chi Kin & Fang, Fei & Langevin, André, 2018. "Single-vendor multi-buyer supply chain coordination with stochastic demand," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 206(C), pages 110-133.
    6. Ilkyeong Moon & Byung-Hyun Ha & Jongchul Kim, 2012. "Inventory systems with variable capacity," European Journal of Industrial Engineering, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 6(1), pages 68-86.
    7. Ulrich, Matthias & Jahnke, Hermann & Langrock, Roland & Pesch, Robert & Senge, Robin, 2021. "Distributional regression for demand forecasting in e-grocery," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 294(3), pages 831-842.
    8. P. Escalona & F. Ordóñez & I. Kauak, 2017. "Critical level rationing in inventory systems with continuously distributed demand," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 39(1), pages 273-301, January.
    9. Rossetti, Manuel D. & Yasin Ünlü, 2011. "Evaluating the robustness of lead time demand models," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 159-176, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:eujine:v:2:y:2008:i:4:p:479-491. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=210 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.