Operations Research Of Periodical Inventory Systems With Considering Behavioral Factors

This thesis investigates operations management of periodical inventory systems with considering impact of decision behaviors. Inventory system with S-shaped util-ity and single distributor multi-retailer inventory system are considered, respectively. Besides, computing optimal policy for inventory system with continuous demand is considered as a preliminary.For inventory system with continuous demand, an algorithm, in which numerical integral and linear interpolation are used, is constructed on discretized grid for com-puting near optimal policy. Upper bound of cost of the near optimal policy as well as lower bound of optimal cost are estimated then. The near optimal policy is proved to converge to the optimal policy as scale of the grid tends to zero.For inventory system with S-shaped utility, exponential-type S-shaped utility is first considered and then general S-shaped utility. Unimodality plays an important role in analysis. For a single period problem with exponential-type S-shaped utility, a state-dependent order-up-to policy with order-up-to levels found by searching is op-timal, and the optimal expected utility is unimodal. For a multi-period problem with exponential-type S-shaped utility, if demand follows log-concave distribution, a dy-namic programming algorithm can be constructed to obtain optimal policy. For a single period problem with general S-shaped utility, if demand follows exponential distribu-tion, a state-dependent order-up-to policy with order-up-to levels found by searching is optimal, and the optimal expected utility is unimodal, while if demand follows a general distribution, some conjectures on optimal policy are proposed. Numerical ex-amples reveal that expectation on gains and risk-aversion due to gains dominate the operations management of inventory system with S-shaped utility.For single distributor multi-retailer inventory system, six operations scenarios are categorized, and approximation dynamic programming algorithms for all scenar-ios each are developed to obtain system cost. Numerical examples show that irregu- lar competition among retailers due to self-interesting reduces whole system interest sharply, and that one can hardly improve system performance only by sharing informa-tion without coordinating system members by some means such as, e.g., an appropriate allocating rule.Results from this thesis provide insights on impact of managers'behaviors on operations management of inventory system, which help the managers design mech-anisms for reducing disadvantage of bounded rationality and improve performance of inventory system.