Inventory Modeling in Supply Chain Management: A Review

In supply chain management, the inventory management of materials, semi-manufactured goods and products is often concerned and attracts a lot of scholars´ attentions. With the economy globalization, three new trends appeared in the supply chain management: materials procurement globalization, manufacture globalization and products distribution globalization. Consequently, three new areas in inventory modeling were paid more attentions to: 1. Multiple supplier and multi-product inventory models from the point of the upstream of the supply chain; 2. Multi-echelon inventory models including manufacturers, dealers and retailers from the point of the interior structure of the supply chain; 3. Stochastic multi-product demand inventory models from the point of the downstream of the supply chain. In this paper, the three areas mentioned above were discussed in detail and some new inventory models and researches were reviewed, and at the end of the paper, the research directions of the inventory management in supply chain management were given.