A comparison study of stock-out policies in vending machine systems

In this paper, we compared three stock-out policies in vending machine systems, which are the no stock-out allowance policy, stock-out policy allowing only give-ups, and stock-out allowance policy, by constructing the respective mathematical models for determining the item allocation to storage compartments and replenishment intervals of vending machines. We performed computational experiments on a test problem in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the three policies with respect to system profit. The results showed the substantial advantage of the stock-out allowance policy over the other two policies.