
A key challenge in inventory management is to identify policies that optimally replenish inventory from multiple suppliers. To solve such optimization problems, inventory managers need to decide what quantities to order from each supplier given the net inventory and outstanding orders so that the expected backlogging, holding, and sourcing costs are jointly minimized. Inventory management problems have been studied extensively for more than 60 years, and yet even basic dual-sourcing problems, in which orders from an expensive supplier arrive faster than orders from a regular supplier, remain intractable in their general form. In addition, there is an emerging need to develop proactive, scalable optimization algorithms that can adjust their recommendations to dynamic demand shifts in a timely fashion. In this work, we approach dual sourcing from a neural network–based optimization lens and incorporate information on inventory dynamics and its replenishment (i.e., control) policies into the design of recurrent neural networks. We show that the proposed neural network controllers (NNCs) are able to learn near-optimal policies of commonly used instances within a few minutes of CPU time on a regular personal computer. To demonstrate the versatility of NNCs, we also show that they can control inventory dynamics with empirical, nonstationary demand distributions that are challenging to tackle effectively using alternative, state-of-the-art approaches. Our work shows that high-quality solutions of complex inventory management problems with nonstationary demand can be obtained with deep neural network optimization approaches that directly account for inventory dynamics in their optimization process. As such, our research opens up new ways of efficiently managing complex, high-dimensional inventory dynamics. History: Accepted by Ram Ramesh, Area Editor for Data Science & Machine Learning. Funding: This work was supported by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (NCCR Automation) [Grant P2EZP2 191888] and the Army Research Office [Grant W911NF-23-1-0129]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0136 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2022.0136 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Machine Learning, 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology, inventory management, 1803 Management Science and Operations Research, 1710 Information Systems, Machine Learning (cs.LG), 1712 Software, optimal control, sourcing strategies, Optimization and Control (math.OC), 1706 Computer Science Applications, FOS: Mathematics, recurrent neural networks, Mathematics - Optimization and Control, 10095 Institute of Sociology
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Machine Learning, 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology, inventory management, 1803 Management Science and Operations Research, 1710 Information Systems, Machine Learning (cs.LG), 1712 Software, optimal control, sourcing strategies, Optimization and Control (math.OC), 1706 Computer Science Applications, FOS: Mathematics, recurrent neural networks, Mathematics - Optimization and Control, 10095 Institute of Sociology
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