Following abstraction and treatment water becomes a vulnerable and perishable product. It is vulnerable in that the integrity of systems used for the storage and distribution of water can be damaged and contamination through ingress can occur. It is perishable in that its microbial quality can deteriorate due to the bacteria remaining after treatment growing on the residual nutrient in the wate...

We consider an online scheduling problem, motivated by the following online auction setting. A non-storable perishable good is produced at a regular rate. It has to be sold immediately to customers whose offers arrive on-line. More formally, we consider the online scheduling problem with preemptions, where each job j is revealed at release time rj , has processing time pj , deadline dj and weig...

Mangoes (Magnifera indica L, keitt variety) are produced in considerable quantities and consumed locally, but are seldom processed. Alzamora et al. [1] reported that about 30-50% of fruits and vegetables in developing countries like Ghana are never consumed due to losses during storage and transportation. Mangoes (Magnifera indica) have shelf life of 3 to 4 weeks in good condition at low temper...

This study addresses the production planning problem for perishable products, in which the cost and shortage of products are minimized subject to a set of constraints such as warehouse space, labor working time and machine time. Using the concept of postponement, the production process for perishable products is differentiated into two phases to better utilize the resources. A two-stage stochas...

In this paper we propose an approach for solving problems of optimal resource capacity allocation to a collection of stochastic dynamic competitors. In particular, we introduce the knapsack problem for perishable items, which concerns the optimal dynamic allocation of a limited knapsack to a collection of perishable or non-perishable items. We formulate the problem in the framework of Markov de...

In current markets of perishable goods such as fish and vegetables, sellers are typically in a weak bargaining position, since perishable products cannot be stored for long without losing their value. To avoid the risk of spoiling products, sellers have few alternatives other than selling their goods at the prices offered by buyers in the markets. The market mechanism needs to be reformed in or...

In this paper, we introduce a physical Internet architecture for fresh food distribution networks with the goal of meeting the key challenges of maximizing the freshness of the delivered product and minimizing waste. The physical Internet (PI) architecture is based on the fundamental assumptions of infrastructure sharing among various parties, standardized addressing of all entities and modular...

In this research, a new two-echelon model has been presented to control the inventory of perishable goods. The performance of the model lies in a supply chain and is based on real conditions and data. The main purpose of the model is to minimize the maintenance cost of the entire chain. However, if the good is perished before reaching the customer (the expiration date is over)...

We examine whether the Coase conjecture [7, 14, 4, 10] is robust against slight ability of commitment of the monopolist not to sell the durable goods to consumers. We quantify the commitment ability in terms of the speed that the durable goods perish, while keeping the time between the o ers small. We demonstrate that the slight commitment capability makes a substantial di erence by constructin...