supply chain management, the inventory
management of materials, semi-manufactured goods and
products is often concerned and attracts a lot of scholars’
attentions. With the economy globalization, three new trends
appeared in the supply chain management: materials
procurement globalization, manufacture globalization and
products distribution globalization. Consequently, three new
areas in inventory modeling were paid more attentions to: 1.
Multiple supplier and multi-product inventory models from the
point of the upstream of the supply chain; 2. Multi-echelon
inventory models including manufacturers, dealers and retailers
from the point of the interior structure of the supply chain; 3.
Stochastic multi-product demand inventory models from the
point of the downstream of the supply chain. In this paper, the
three areas mentioned above were discussed in detail and some
new inventory models and researches were reviewed, and at the
end of the paper, the research directions of the inventory
management in supply chain management were given