The lateral emergency transshipment in distribution systems consists in organizing inventory transferts between retailers to face shortage situations. Its implementation leads to adopt an appropriate transhipment policy and harmonize its parameters with inventory policy parameters and inventory control policy. The objective is to ensure a desired service level at minimum cost. Thie work is situated in this context and focused on the analysis of emergency transhipment benefits in distribution systems faced to random customers demand. Each retailer used an (R,s,S) inventory control policy. Our study is related to three different distribution systems structure : two echelons two retailers inventory system with unit transhipment cost; two echelons multi retailers inventory system with fixed transhipment cost; multi echelons multi retailers inventory system with fixe transhipment cost. For each of these structures we analyzed the sensibility of system behaviour to input parameters. Our objective is to determine on a finite horizon the inventory parameters (s, S) that minimize total cost under service level condition.
