This paper presents a two-period model to analyze the dynamic pricing behavior of two profit-maximizing firms that have equal inventories of perfectly substitutable and perishable products. Two versions of the problem are studied. In the first version, firms simultaneously announce their first period prices, observe the sales each makes, and then simultaneously announce their second period pric...

While the development and application of inventory control models of deterioration products is one of the main concerns of researchers and practitioners, most studies done in this field have focused on inventory models under fixed supply lead time assumption. In this paper, at first we study researches done in inventory control of deteriorating items and classify them based on modeling approach...

Inventory shrinkage is a common problem in the management of returnable containers. RFID-based container tracking systems have been proposed as a possible solution. Benefits of RFID-based tracking of returnable transport items such as pallets, kegs and boxes are documented in several case studies, but have so far hardly been analyzed from a theoretical perspective. In this article, we analyze t...

Manufacturers make production decisions and carry inventory to satisfy uncertain demand. When holding and shortage costs are high, carrying inventory could be even more expensive for a capacitated production system. Recent developments in information technology and sales strategies enabled firms to acquire, collect, or induce advance demand information. We address a periodic-review, stochastic,...

Consider a multiple booking class airline-seat inventory control problem that relates to either a single flight leg or to multiple flight legs. During the time before the flight, the airline may face the problems of (1) what are the suitable prices for the opened booking classes, and (2) when to close those opened booking classes. This work deals with these two problems by only using the pricin...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product with a finite horizon and periodic review. The demand distribution in each period is determined by an exogenous Markov chain. Pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortages are backlogged. The surplus costs as well as fixed and variable costs are state dependent. We show t...

Solving Robust Inventory Problems In this work we consider setting the optimal inventory control policies for a single buffer when demand is uncertain, in a robust framework. Unlike traditional inventory models we do not assume that the demand is random with a known distribution. Instead, demand can take values from a given uncertainty set. Our objective is to find the policy that minimize the ...

The common belief is that using Reinforcement Learning methods (RL) with bootstrapping gives better results than without. However, inclusion of bootstrapping increases the complexity of the RL implementation and requires significant effort. This study investigates whether inclusion of bootstrapping is worth the effort when applying RL to inventory problems. Specifically, we investigate bootstra...

We consider the periodic review inventory control problem in which the purchasing cost of the product changes, in a Markovian fashion, from one period to the next. After establishing (with and without the non-speculation assumption) that an order upto policy is optimal, we develop an efficient recursive solution procedure to compute the optimal levels. In addition, we propose a measure for the ...

A significant amount of work has investigated inventory control problems associated with fresh produce. Much of this work has considered deteriorating inventory control with many models having been proposed for the various situations that exist. However, no researchers have specifically studied fresh produce which has its own special characteristics. Most research categorise fresh produce into ...