Inventory control under temporal demand heteroscedasticity

This paper studies an inventory control problem when the variance of demand is time-varying and exhibits temporal heteroscedasticity. We use a first-order autoregressive process to characterize the dynamic changes in the level of demand over time and a GARCH(1, 1) structure to describe the changes in the variance of demand. Under these demand settings, we quantify the effect of a temporal heterogeneous variance on inventory performance for a system controlled via an order-up-to-level policy. We show that the effect of temporal heteroscedasticity on the forecasting accuracy can be additively decomposed from the total forecasting error variance. The decomposition is used to derive the absolute and relative cost deviations when the temporal heteroscedasticity is ignored. The relationship of these cost deviations to demand autocorrelation and replenishment leadtime is investigated. Computational results show that ignoring temporal heteroscedasticity can increase firm’s inventory costs by as much as 30% when demand autocorrelation is highly positive.