A New Optimal Policy for Service System with Nonstationary Stochastic Demand

The performance of service system is especially low when demand is stochastic and nonstationary. This paper considers an inventory control problem with multiple-period replenishment lead time and nonstationary stochastic demand, and provides an optimal policy for this kind of problem. The problem is formulated as a stochastic dynamic programming model, then a solution algorithm which can obtain the optimal solution is developed. Numerical comparisons verify the effectiveness of the proposed policy.