ABSTRACT
Random influences or phenomena occur everywhere in nature and social life. Random influences partially or fully contribute to the variability of parameters like wind velocity, rainfall intensity, electromagnetic noise levels, fluctuations of share prices, failure time points of technical units, timely occurrences of births and deaths in biological populations, of earthquakes, or of arrivals of customers at service centers. Random influences induce random events. The probability of a random event is the closer to 1, the more frequently it occurs. Probability theory together with its applications in science, medicine, engineering, economy et al. are integrated in the field of stochastics. Apart from probability theory, mathematical statistics is the most important part of stochastics. Inventory theory helps with designing warehouses so that they can on the one hand meet the demand for goods with sufficiently high probability, and on the other hand keep the costs for storage as small as possible.
