Suheyl Gulecyuz, S. Armagan Tarim, Barry O’Sullivan, University College Cork

A Heuristic Method for Perishable Inventory Systems under NonStationary Demand

Perishable goods are the items or products which lose their freshness and become stale after some time. This is called lifetime or shelf life and can be due to due to environmental factors. Product lifetime can either be constant or variable. Dairy products, meat products, fruits and vegetables, blood products, medical drugs, etc. are the most well-known perishable products and items. In perishable inventory systems, the replenishment policy must take the product lifetime and the number of perishable items into account in order to minimise the total cost.
Perishable items are used with respect to various issuing policies with respect to the remaining lifetime to meet the customer demand.
Our objective with this research is the find an ordering and replenishment cycle policy that minimises the total finite-horizon unit holding, penalty, outdating, ordering costs and the fixed setup cost.

The possible future direction of this research might be extending this approach into the positive outdating cost, positive lead time, random shelf life, multi-product inventory, pricing, or joint replenishment cases.