Browsing by Subject "Effective lifetime"

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Open Access
An exact analysis on age-based control policies for perishable inventories
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-09-01) Poormoaied, S.; Gürler, Ülkü; Berk, E.
We investigate the impact of effective lifetime of items in an age-based control policy for perishable inventories, a so-called (Q, r, T) policy, with positive lead time and fixed lifetime. The exact analysis of this control policy in the presence of a service level constraint is available in the literature under the restriction that the aging process of a batch begins when it is unpacked for consumption, and that at most one order can be outstanding at any time. In this work, we generalize those results to allow for more than one outstanding order and assume that the aging process of a batch starts since the time that it is ordered. Under this aging process, we derive the effective lifetime distribution of batches at the beginning of embedded cycles in an embedded Markov process. We provide the operating characteristic expressions and construct the cost rate function by the renewal reward theorem approach. We develop an exact algorithm by investigating the cost rate and service level constraint structures. The proposed policy considerably dominates its special two-parameter policies, which are time-dependent (Q, T) and stock-dependent (Q, r) policies. Numerical studies demonstrate that the aging process of items significantly influences the inventory policy performance. Moreover, allowing more than one outstanding order in the system reaps considerable cost savings, especially when the lifetime of items is short and the service level is high.
Open Access
On the (Q,r) policy for perishables with positive lead times and multiple outstanding orders
(Springer New York LLC, 2020-01) Berk, Emre; Gürler, Ülkü; Poormoaied, Saeed
We consider an inventory system for perishables with fixed lifetimes, positive replenishment lead times and lost sales in the presence of non-negligible fixed ordering costs. The system is studied under the lotsize reorder level (Q, r) policy. An exact analysis of this system based on the stationary distribution of the remaining lifetime process is provided by Berk and Gürler (Oper Res 56(5):1238-1246, 2008) under the restriction that there is at most one outstanding order at any time (r< Q). In this work, we generalize their results to allow for more than one outstanding orders (r≥ Q). We provide the operating characteristics of the inventory system and construct the exact expected cost rate expression using a renewal theoretic approach. An illustrative numerical study indicates that allowing for multiple outstanding orders (r≥ Q) may result in significant savings in the expected cost rate, compared to the case with r< Q. In particular, when the fixed lifetimes are short and the ordering costs are low, expected costs can be reduced by more than half.