【正文】
tream when they make decision of the inventory management, and multiechelon inventory modeling needs to be applied. B. Internet and Ebusiness based virtual inventory modeling With the development and application of the Internet and Ebusiness in supply chain, the purchase and order costs between buyers and sellers are decreasing, and the risks of suppliers are being reduced. This results in that multiple suppliers’ pattern is superior to single supplier pattern. The development of IT causes informationsharing between the buyers and the sellers. Buyer’s demand can be forecasted based on the information of the venders, however, suppliers should deal with a great deal of data. Therefore, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Database have the wide application prospects in inventory management。 in the meanwhile, more attentions will be paid to virtual inventory modeling. C. Inventory modeling under asymmetric information In the real supply chain, every partner (manufacturer or supplier) makes his decision independently, hence there exits asymmetric information. Even if the coordination has been set up in supply chain, the partner usually keeps his mercial information, such as costs, profits and so on, in secret, which leads to that it is difficult to get this information for other partners. Therefore, inventory modeling under asymmetric information is more valuable and practicable. There are some researches on this field, in which the game theory was often applied to decisionmaking under asymmetric information。 however it needs to be studied more intensively and extensively.V.CONCLUSIONIn this paper, three types of inventory models were discussed from the aspects of supply chain management:(1)Multisupplier and multiproduct inventory model。(2)Multiechelon inventory model。The research history and development of the inventory models were reviewed and the latest research results were discussed. Finally, the future research directions of the inventory management in supply chain management were given. The inventory management was under way of integration, the IT and Internet will be considered and paid more and more attentions to inventory modeling, and inventory modeling under asymmetric information will bee more valuable and practicable.