Design of Robust Replenishment Controls for Warehouses and Supply Chains under Demands With Trend Components

This paper takes up the problem of devising Robust Replenishment Control strategies for a supply chain under a demand pattern predominated by large trend components. The chain follows a responsiveness strategy, and has a distribution warehouse at the downstream end, which caters to the demand off-take. We study the effect of different types of replenishment policies followed in practice and in the literature, and compare their performances with one another in the warehouse system when subjected to a demand with large trend components, looking at how quickly they are able to respond to the demand disturbance. We find that many of the conventional policies perform poorly under such circumstances, and we propose modifications to enhance their performance. Some of the modified policies proposed herein are found to have superior performance characteristics and an enhanced level of robustness to more general types of demands as well, and as such, could hence be expected to be of use in very general applications. The control schemes discussed herein can easily be built into the control/management software of such systems, and could thereby enhance the automated decision capability of the syste