The Control of Inventories and Production Rates---A Survey

The inventory and production control problem encompasses purchasing and ordering decisions, production-rate decisions, and scheduling decisions. Over the past twenty-five years there has been considerable study of ordering decisions, under “static” assumptions, and workable decision rules are available. Work on “dynamic” rules is still in an early stage, but a general framework of analysis, and several methods of approach have been developed. Production rate decisions have been investigated from the standpoint of servomechanism “feedback” theory, the calculus of variations, and several forecasting techniques. A combination of these approaches promises to yield simple, practical decision rules. The most urgent current research problem is to devise workable decision-making procedures for complex interrelated industrial situations by finding methods for “coupling” the decision rules that apply to the individual parts of the system. Industry has made some use of the “static” decision rules now available in the literature; there has yet been little application of the dynamic ordering and production rate rules. Operations Research , ISSN 0030-364X, was published as Journal of the Operations Research Society of America from 1952 to 1955 under ISSN 0096-3984.