论文标题
使用复发性神经网络控制双源库存系统
Control of Dual-Sourcing Inventory Systems using Recurrent Neural Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
库存管理中的一个主要挑战是确定最佳补充多个供应商库存的政策。为了解决此类优化问题,库存经理需要决定从每个供应商那里订购哪些数量,鉴于净库存和未偿订单,以便将预期的积压,持有和采购成本共同最小化。库存管理问题已经进行了60多年的广泛研究,甚至基本的双源问题,其中昂贵的供应商的订单比普通供应商的订单更快,在其一般形式中仍然棘手。此外,有必要开发积极的可扩展优化算法,这些算法可以及时将其建议调整为动态需求转移。在这项工作中,我们从基于神经网络的优化镜头进行双重采购,并将有关库存动态及其补充(即控制)策略的信息纳入复发性神经网络的设计。我们表明,拟议的神经网络控制器(NNC)能够在常规的个人计算机上几分钟内在CPU时间的几分钟内学习常用实例的近乎最佳策略。为了证明NNC的多功能性,我们还表明它们可以通过经验,非平稳的需求分布来控制库存动态,这些分布在使用替代性,最先进的方法中有效地解决。我们的工作表明,可以通过深度神经网络优化的方法来获得复杂库存管理问题的高质量解决方案,这些方法可以直接解释其优化过程中的库存动态。因此,我们的研究开辟了有效管理复杂,高维库存动态的新方法。
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 over 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, non-stationary 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 non-stationary 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.