Joint Order Fulfillment and Inventory Management in Assemble-to-Order Generalized W Systems

Joint Order Fulfillment and Inventory Management in Assemble-to-Order Generalized W Systems Despite their prevalence and considerable benefits, assemble-to-order systems are notoriously difficult to analyze and manage. In the paper “Joint Order Fulfillment and Inventory Management in Assemble-to-Order Generalized W Systems,” Yu, Zheng, and Chen develop a strategy under which the policy for demand fulfillment is static nested and that for inventory procurement is of the newsvendor type. They show that the strategy is asymptotically optimal in the high-demand regime for assemble-to-order generalized W systems, in which k products are assembled from a common component and k product-specific components.