The earliest paper to consider supply disruptions seems to be
that of Meyer et al.(1979), who consider a production facility
facing constant,deterministic demand.The facility has a capaci-
tated storage buffer,and the production process is subject to
stochastic failures and repairs.The goal of the paper is not to
optimize the system but to compute the percentage of time that
demands aremet.The optimization of such finite-production-rate
systems has been considered by a number of subsequent authors
(e.g., Hu, 1995;Moinzadeh and Aggarwal,1997;Liu and Cao,1999;
Abboud, 2001).