A comparative evaluation of analytical approximations for analyzing production-inventory networks

Since the early 1990s, there has been an increased interest in developing analytical models for production-inventory networks, which consider queueing and planned inventory issues in a unified manner. There appears to be considerable similarity among the analytical models and approximations developed by different researchers. The purpose of this article is to clearly identify the similarities and differences among the various approaches by using a tandem production-inventory network as a test-bed. In addition, numerical experiments were performed by varying different parameters to gain better insight into the performance prediction capability of the different approximations and to rank order the different approaches.