Abstract
Component commonality is a well-known approach in manufacturing, where the same components are used for multiple products. It has been implemented by many established companies such as Airbus, Kodak, Toyota, etc. We consider a standard two-product inventory model with a common component. The demands for the products are independent random variables. Instead of the usual approach to minimize the total shortage quantity, we propose to minimize the total shortage cost. The resulting problem is a non-convex nonlinear mathematical program. We illustrate the use of a primal-dual proximal method to solve this problem by obtaining numerically the optimal allocations of components. In particular, we show that a higher unit shortage cost induces a higher allocation.