This paper is concerned with the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem. To make this problem more practical, space restriction and lead time proportional to lot size are considered. Since the space for the inventory is limited in most practical inventory system, the space restriction for the inventory of a vendor and a buyer is considered. As product’s quantity to be manufactured by the vendor is increased, the lead time for the order is usually increased. Therefore, lead time for the product is proportional to the order quantity by the buyer. Demand is assumed to be stochastic and the continuous review inventory policy is used by the buyer. If the buyer places an order, then the vendor will start to manufacture products and the products will be transferred to the buyer with equal shipments many times. The mathematical formulation with space restriction for the inventory of a vendor and a buyer is suggested in this paper. This problem is constrained nonlinear integer programming problem. Order quantity, reorder points for the buyer, and the number of shipments are required to be determined. A Lagrangian relaxation approach, a popular solution method for constrained problem, is developed to find lower bound of this problem. Since a Lagrangian relaxation approach cannot guarantee the feasible solution, the solution method based on the Lagrangian relaxation approach is proposed to provide with a good feasible solution. Total costs by the proposed method are pretty close to those by the Lagrangian relaxation approach. Sensitivity analysis for space restriction for the vendor and the buyer is done to figure out the relationships between parameters.

The modular assembly system can make it possible for the variety of products to be assembled in a short lead time. In this system, necessary components are assembled to optional components tailor to customers’ orders. Budget for inventory investments composed of inventory and purchasing costs are practically limited and the purchasing cost is often paid when an order is arrived. Service cost is assumed to be proportional to service level and it is included in budget constraint. We develop a heuristic procedure to find a good solution for a continuous review inventory system of the modular assembly system with a budget constraint. A regression analysis using a quadratic function based on the exponential function is applied to the cumulative density function of a normal distribution. With the regression result, an efficient heuristics is proposed by using an approximation for some complex functions that are composed of exponential functions only. A simple problem is introduced to illustrate the proposed heuristics.