Ministry of Finance

On January 2002 twelve European countries welcomed the euro as their new coin. The process leading up to the adoption of the euro had to be carefully planned, in particular the logistics around the production of coins. The demand for coins is highly uncertain, and the production times for coins from raw materials is highly variable. Therefore, one could have a high (safety) stock to react quickly to demand, but this brings forth high inventory and holding costs. On the other hand, the societal costs may be large due to an insuficient number of coins outstanding when the inventory is too low. In this project, we did a preliminary analysis of optimal ordering and production strategies for the euro coins.

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