Você está na página 1de 7

The Single-Period Inventory Problem

Imagine a decision problem of the following type: You face a "quantity" decision: For example, how many tickets to sell for a flight, how many minutes to allow for a trip, how many product catalogs to print for this year, or how many dollars to put in an ATM machine. You are facing an uncertain (i.e., random) demand: Continuing the examples, the number of seats on the airplane plus the number of no-shows, the time the trip will actually take, the number of catalog requests that will come in over the year, or the amount of money that patrons will (attempt to) withdraw from the machine before it is restocked. You must live with the consequences of your decision: You can't sell extra tickets in the final minutes before departure, you can't stop the clock or go back in time, the setup cost of a second press-run is prohibitive, or you can't justify the cost of an "emergency" armored-car run. The cost of being "under"( i.e., of setting your quantity below demand, rather than precisely at the demanded level) varies linearly with the amount by which you are under (i.e., is a fixed per-unit-under cost). The cost of being "over" (i.e., of setting your quantity above the demanded level) also varies linearly with the amount by which you are over.

Let D be the random variable which represents demand, and let cunder and cover, respectively, be the per-unit costs of being "under" or "over." Let your policy (quantity) variable be Q, and consider the difference between the. expected cost of adopting a policy of Q+1, and a policy of Q (i.e., consider the marginal expected cost difference): Providing a (Q+1)st unit will be costly if D Q ; it will be beneficial if D > Q. Therefore, the net expected marginal benefit of setting your policy at Q+1, instead of at Q, is cunderPr(D>Q) - coverPr(DQ) . If this is positive, Q+1 is better than Q. Similarly, the net marginal cost of providing only Q-1 units, instead of Q, is cunderPr(D>Q-1) - coverPr(DQ-1) . If this is negative, Q-1 is better than Q. Pulling this all together, and using the facts that Pr(D>Q) = 1-Pr(DQ) and Pr(D>Q-1) = 1-Pr(DQ-1), we find that an optimal policy Q* (i.e., one from which you don't want to move either up or down) must satisfy

Pr(D Q * -1)

cunder Pr(D Q*). cunder cover

Therefore, the optimal policy Q* can be found by solving

Pr(D Q*)

c under c under c over

(and rounding up, if necessary). The fraction on the right is called the "critical fractile ." The optimal policy involves choosing Q so the chance that you don't "run out," (equivalently, the chance that you are "over") is equal to this critical fractile.

Examples
You order Christmas trees for your lot in Evanston from a tree farm in Oregon. Trees cost you $30 apiece (including shipping), and you sell them for $75. Per Evanston regulations, any leftover (unsold) trees must be properly disposed of, at a cost of $5 per tree. You anticipate that demand over the pre-Christmas season will be normally distributed, with an expected value of 300 and a standard deviation of 50. How many trees should you order? Buying one more tree than the number demanded, rather than exactly the correct number (i.e., being "over"), will leave you $30+$5 = $35 poorer. Buying one less tree than the number you could sell, rather than exactly the correct number (i.e., being "under"), will leave you $75-$30 - $45 poorer. Therefore, $35 $45 cover cunder This problem references the "normal" probability distribution, which we haven't discussed yet. The final step (computing the optimal order quantity) will be clearer when we get to that point in the course. The picture to the right illustrates what's going on.

56.25% critical fractile 308 optimal order quantity

You are selling tickets for a 300-seat flight. You profit $500 from each filled seat, but lose $250 on each person bumped from the flight. The number of no-shows is equally likely to be anywhere between 5 and 95. $250 $500 cover cunder

66.67% critical fractile 365 optimal order quantity, since Pr(300 + noshows 364) = 60/91 < 66.67% < 61/91 = Pr(300 + noshows) 365)

bility distribution,
0 100 200 300 400 500

ep (computing the we get to that point in s what's going on.

The optimal policy is to position ourselves 56.25% of the way "up" in the demand distribution, i.e., to order enough trees to give us a 56.25% chance of meeting demand.

300 expected sales 50 standard deviation 0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200 225 250 275 300 325 350 375 400 425 450 475 500 308 308 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0001 0.0004 0.0011 0.0026 0.0048 0.0070 0.0080 0.0070 0.0048 0.0026 0.0011 0.0004 0.0001 0.0000 0.0000

expected sales standard deviation

chart data

0.0000 0.0090

Accounting
Determing cunder and cover requires some care. For example, in the overbooking problem, the cost to the airline of not having sold a ticket that would have been used to fill a seat on the flight depends on what the prospective passenger, refused the purchase of the ticket, would do. If your airline is the only one flying the passenger's desired route, he/she will probably fly with you at another time, i.e., cunder is quite small. If, on the other hand, the route is quite competitive, you might lose that customer's business, and cunder will be much larger. In the ATM case, by being one dollar short of demand, you generate some ill will (and potential lost on-premises sales), but you are, in compensation, able to keep that dollar productively employed elsewhere. Similarly, not being able to immediately send a requestor a catalog might cost you some immediate sales, while saving you the cost of printing that catalog. But, if you will eventually ship that customer a copy of next-year's catalog, you'll still bear the cost of printing a catalog to meet the customer's demand. Then again, perhaps the customer would have not only asked for this year's catalog, but eventually for next year's catalog as well, in which case you have saved the cost of printing a catalog. It typically falls upon the marketing department to accurately assess the cost of failing to meet a unit of demand. Marketing would probably - in the "catalog" case - estimate cunder by averaging over the different ways the customer's catalog request might ultimately work out.

Você também pode gostar