We consider the One Warehouse Multi-Retailer (OWMR) problem with deterministic time-varying demand in the case where shortages are allowed. Demand may be either backlogged or lost. We present a simple combinatorial algorithm to build an approximate solution from a decomposition of the system into single-echelon subproblems. We establish that the algorithm has a performance guarantee of 3 for the OWMR with backlog under mild assumptions on the cost structure. In addition, we improve this guarantee to 2 in the special case of the Joint-Replenishment Problem (JRP) with backlog. As a by-product of our approach, we show that our decomposition provides a new lower bound of the optimal cost. A similar technique also leads to a 2-approximation for the OWMR problem with lost-sales. In all cases, the complexity of the algorithm is linear in the number of retailers and quadratic in the number of time periods, which makes it a valuable tool for practical applications. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first constant approximations for the OWMR with shortages. 
Constant approximation algorithms for the one warehouse multiple retailers problem with backlog or lost-sales