Inventory Control Under Parametric Uncertainty of Underlying Models

Abstract

A large number of problems in inventory control, production planning and scheduling, location, transportation, finance, and engineering design require that decisions be made in the presence of uncertainty of underlying models. In the present paper we consider the case, where it is known that the underlying distribution belongs to a parametric family of distributions. The problem of determining an optimal decision rule in the absence of complete information about the underlying distribution, i.e., when we specify only the functional form of the distribution and leave some or all of its parameters unspecified, is seen to be a standard problem of statistical estimation. Unfortunately, the classical theory of statistical estimation has little to offer in general type of situation of loss function. In the paper, for improvement or optimization of statistical decisions under parametric uncertainty, a new technique of invariant embedding of sample statistics in a performance index is proposed. This technique represents a simple and computationally attractive statistical method based on the constructive use of the invariance principle in mathematical statistics. Unlike the Bayesian approach, an invariant embedding technique is independent of the choice of priors. It allows one to eliminate unknown parameters from the problem and to find the best invariant decision rules, which have smaller risk than any of the well-known decision rules. A numerical example is given.