Review of Inventory Control Models: A Classification Based on Methods of Obtaining Optimal Control Parameters

Inventory control has been a major point of discussion in industrial engineering and operations research for over 100 years. Various advanced numerical methods can be used for solving inventory control problems, which makes it a highly multidisciplinary filed attracting researchers from different academic disciplines. This fact makes it a daunting task to subsume the gargantuan spectrum of literature related to inventory control theory in one treatise. In light of this fact, this paper focuses on the timeline of inventory control models with respect to methodologies behind deriving optimal control parameters. Such methodologies include analytical approaches, optimal control theory, dynamic programming, simulation-based optimization and metamodel-based optimization.