An Interactive Inventory Simulation Model

Abstract

The interactive inventory simulation model described in this thesis was developed in BASIC language in early 1978. It is given a coded name GIPSI- a General-purpose Inventory Policy Simulation Package, designed to be used on a Hewlett-Packard Access 2000 machine. The package occupies about 600 blocks or 0.3 M-bytes of storage. GIPSI allows the user to simulate four commonly used, single-item inventory policies under varying demand and lead-time situations to produce various measures of effectiveness. The four inventory policies offered are: reorder level policy, reorder cycle policy, reorder level policy with periodic reviews and (s, S) policy. The following facilities are incorporated in the package to enhance greater flexibility and utility of GIPSI:- (i) Analysis of input data including goodness of fit test for both demand per unit time and lead-time data; (ii) (iii) (ii) Sample display of simulation results; (iii) Automatic optimization procedure in locating the optimal or near-optimal net revenue. Furthermore, great effort has been taken in the design of GIPSI to ensure that simulation can be carried out interactively by users with little or no computer background. So far GIPSI has shown to be particularly useful in the following areas:- (i) As a teaching aid to students specialising in inventory control via interactive simulation; (ii) (iii) (ii) As a tool for analysing certain stock situations encountered in industry; (iii) As a research program for studying certain characteristics of inventory policies.