Ordering policies for an inventory system with three supply modes

This article explores ordering policies for inventory systems with three supply modes. This model is particularly interesting because the optimal ordering decision needs to balance the inventory and purchase costs, as well as the costs for earlier and later periods. The latter cost trade‐off is present only in inventory systems with three or more supply modes. Therefore, the result not only offers guidelines for the operation of the concerned inventory systems, but also provides valuable insight into the complex cost trade‐offs when more supply modes are available. We assume that the difference between the lead times is one period, and the inventory holding and shortage costs are linear. We analyze two cases and obtain the structure of the optimal ordering policy. Moreover, in the first case, explicit formulas are derived to calculate the optimal order‐up‐to levels. In the second case, although the optimal order‐up‐to levels are functions of the initial inventory state and are not obtained in closed form, their properties are discussed. We also develop heuristic ordering policies based on the news‐vendor model. Our numerical experiments suggest that the heuristic policies perform reasonably well. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.