Development of Inventory Control System for Large-scale Retailers using Neural Network and (s*,S*) Policy

신경회로망과 (s*,S*) 정책을 이용한 대규모 유통업을 위한 재고 관리 시스템의 개발

Since the business scales of retailing companies become to be very large and the number of items dealt increases explosively, automation of inventory management becomes one of the most important issues to solve in retailing industry. In order to accomplish this automation of inventory management, there must be a great need to a method which can perform real-time decision making on inventory control in an automatic fashion, while communicating with inventory information systems like POS system and automatic warehousing system. But even in this circumstance, there are also many obstructions to such automation like varying demands, limited capacity of warehouse and exhibition room, need for strategic consideration on inventory control, etc., in a real sense. Due to these reasons, it seems very difficult that most large-scaled retailing companies get fully automated inventory management system. To overcome those difficulties and reflect them into inventory control, we propose a automated inventory control methodology for retailing industry based on neural network and policy model. Especially, policy model is devised to deal with dynamic varying demands and using this model, strategic goals on inventory can be considered into inventory control mechanism. Our proposed approach is implemented in workstation and its performance is also empirically verified also against to real case of one of the major retailing firm in Korea.