Improved Approximation Guarantees for Joint Replenishment in Continuous Time

Abstract

The primary objective of this work is to revisit and revitalize one of the most fundamental models in deterministic inventory management, the continuous-time joint replenishment problem. Our main contribution consists of resolving several long-standing open questions in this context. For most of these questions, we obtain the first quantitative improvement over power-of-$2$ policies and their nearby derivatives, which have been state-of-the-art in terms of provable performance guarantees since the mid-80's.