The Deterministic, Two-Product, Inventory System with Capacity Constraint

This paper considers the standard deterministic inventory system for two products with a capacity constraint and describes how to find the optimal policy amongst all policies which have fixed order quantities. This involves the idea of staggered initial orders and periodic policies, and includes the classical Lagrange multiplier technique and the equal order intervals method as special cases. It is shown that the usual Lagrange multiplier technique will never produce the optimal policy (in the class described above) except in the trivial case, when the capacity constraint is satisfied by the optimal unconstrained policy.