An Application Of Dynamic Programming To Inventory Control In The Publishing Industry

An Application of Dynamic Programming to Inventory Control in the Publishing Industry

Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences

Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences was first conceived, published, and dis· seminated by the Center for Information and Numerical Data Analysis and Synthesis (CINDAS) *at Purdue University in 1957, starting its coverage of theses with the academic year 1955. Beginning with Volume 13, the printing and dissemination phases of the ac· tivity were transferred to University Microfilms/Xerox of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with the thought that such an arrangement would be more beneficial to the academic and general scientific and technical community. After five years of this joint undertaking we had concluded that it was in the interest of all concerned if the printing and distribution of the volume were handled by an international publishing house to assure improved service and broader dissemination. Hence, starting with Volume 18, Masters Theses in the Pure and Applied Sciences has been disseminated on a worldwide basis by Plenum Publishing Corporation of New York, and in the same year the coverage was broadened to include Canadian universities. All back issues can also be ordered from Plenum. We have reported in Volume 20 (thesis year 1975) a total of 10,374 theses titles from 28 Canadian and 239 United States universities. We are sure that this broader base for theses titles reported will greatly enhance the value of this important annual reference work. The organization of Volume 20 is identical to that of past years. It consists of theses titles arranged by discipline and by university within each discipline.

Dynamic Programming and Inventory Control

This book presents a unified theory of dynamic programming and Markov decision processes and its application to a major field of operations research and operations management: inventory control. Models are developed in discrete time as well as in continuous time. For continuous time, this book concentrates only on models of interest to inventory control. For discrete time, the focus is mainly on infinite horizon models. The book also covers the difference between impulse control and continuous control. Ergodic control is considered in the context of impulse control, and some simple rules currently used in practice are justified. Chapter 2 introduces some of the classical static problems which are preliminary to the dynamic models of interest in inventory control. This book is not a general text on control theory and dynamic programming, in that the systems dynamics are mostly limited to inventory models. For these models, however, it seeks to be as comprehensive as possible, although finite horizon models in discrete time are not developed, since they are largely described in existing literature. On the other hand, the ergodic control problem is considered in detail, and probabilistic proofs as well as analytical proofs are provided. The techniques developed in this work can be extended to more complex models, covering additional aspects of inventory control.