Perishable inventory systems with variable input and demand rates

Abstract

We consider a certain class of perishable inventory systems with items and demands arriving at random times. The shelf lifetime of every item is finite and deterministic. Every demand is for a single item and is satisfied by the oldest item on the shelf, if available. Generalizing previous work, we assume that the input and/or the demand rate depend on the current value of the basic virtual outdating process (VOT). For different models of this kind we derive the steady-state distribution of the VOT and of the number of items on the shelf.