Background: The advancement of Industry 4.0 technologies has affected every aspect of supply chains. Recently, enterprises have tried to create more value for their businesses by tapping into these new technologies. Warehouses have been one of the most critical sections in a supply chain affected by Industry 4.0 technologies. Methods: By recognizing the role of inventory management in a supply chain and its importance, this paper aims to highlight the impact of IoT technologies on inventory management in supply chains and conducts a comprehensive study to identify the research gap of applying IoT to inventory management. The trend and potential opportunities of applying IoT to inventory management in the Industry 4.0 era are explored by analyzing the literature. Results: Our findings show that the research on this topic is growing in various industries. A broad range of journals is paying particular attention to this topic and publishing more articles in this research direction. Conclusions: Upgrading a supply chain into an integrated supply chain 4.0 is beneficial. Given the changes in fourth-generation technology compared to previous generations, the approach of conventional inventory replenishment policies seems not responsive enough to new technologies and is not able to cope with IoT systems well.

This paper studies stability of network models that capture macroscopic features of data communication networks, including the Internet. The network model consists of a set of links and a set of possible routes that are fixed subsets of links. A connection is dynamically established along one of the routes to transmit data as requested and is terminated after the transmission is over. The transmission bandwidth of a link is dynamically allocated, according to specific bandwidth allocation policy, to ongoing connections that traverse the link. A network model is said to be stable under a given bandwidth allocation policy if, roughly, the number of ongoing connections in the network will not blow up over time. We consider a stationary and a bursty network model; the former assumes stochastically stationary arrival processes of connections as did many theoretical studies, while the latter allows more realistic bursty and correlated arrival processes. For both models under a necessary stability condition (i.e., the average offered transmission load on each link is within its bandwidth capacity), we show that the proportionally fair, the minimum potential delay, the max-min fair, and a class of utility-maximizing bandwidth allocation policies ensure network model stability, while some priority-oriented and maximum throughput policies do not. Interestingly, the bandwidth allocation policy that maximizes the arctan(·) utility ensures the stability of the stationary model but not the bursty model. This raises a serious concern about the current practice in the Internet protocol design, since such a policy is thought of as a good approximation of one of the most widely used TCP in the Internet.

This paper addresses two practical problems from a liner shipping company, i.e. the container flow management problem and the ship deployment problem, at the tactical planning level. A sequential model and a joint optimisation model are formulated to solve the problems. Our results show that the company should implement the joint optimisation model at the tactical planning level to improve the shipping capacity utilisation rather than the sequential model used in the current practice. Repositioning empty containers also need to be considered jointly with the nonempty container flow at the tactical planning level. Some important managerial insights into the operational and business processes are gained.