Strategic safety stocks in supply chains

Increasing customer requirements, product variety, and market competition demand for service and cost improvements by model based inventory control in supply chains. The book presents approaches for safety stock determination in manufacturing and logistics networks. Most of the existing literature provides methods for very specific types of supply networks. The approach presented in this book follows a material flow philosophy that allows for several extensions of the basic models and therefore offers a wide applicability within decision support systems. Models for several types of problems and network structures are presented and analyzed to develop efficient optimization algorithms and heuristics.