Inventory Management: Modeling Real-life Supply Chains and Empirical Validity

It is our intention to write a different overview of inventory models, from single item single echelon models to multi-item multi-echelon models, then is mostly provided in text books on Operations Management (e.g. Nahmias and Olsen (2015) and Silver et al. (2016)). We hope that this paper provides complementary knowledge. Instead of starting with inventory models that are tractable from a mathematical point of view, we start from the inventory management problem and the modeling challenges to be faced.