Nonlinear Programming Analysis to Estimate Implicit Inventory Backorder Costs

In this paper, we use nonlinear programming to provide an alternative treatment of the economic order quantity problem with planned backorders. Many businesses, such as capital-goods firms that deal with expensive products and some service industries that cannot store their services, operate with substantial backlogs. In practical problems, it is usually very difficult to estimate accurately the values of the two types of backorder costs, i.e., the time-dependent unit backorder cost and the unit backorder cost. We redefine the original problem without including these backorder costs and construct a nonlinear programming problem with two service measure constraints which may be easier to specify than the backorder costs. We find that, with this different formulation of our new problem, we obtain results which give implicit estimates of the backorder costs. The alternative formulation provides an easier-to-use model and managerially meaningful results. Next, we show that, for a wide range of parameter values, it usually suffices to consider only one type of backorder cost, or equivalently, only one type of service measure constraint. Finally, we develop expressions which bracket the optimal values of the decision variables in a narrow range and provide a simple method for computing the optimal solution. In the most complicated case, this method requires finding the unique root of a polynomial.