Supply chains for perishable items consist of products with a fixed shelf life and limited production/collection; managing them requires competent decision-making. With the objective of placing the learners in the position of decision-makers, we propose the Blood Supply Chain Game which simulates the supply chain of blood units from donors to patients based on a real case study modelling the UK...

Seasonal items like fruits, fish, winter cosmetics, fashion apparel, etc. generally exhibits different demand patterns at various times during the season. Production and inventory planning must reflect this property for cost effectiveness and optimization of resources. This paper presents two production-inventory models for perishable seasonal products that minimize total inventory costs. The m...

ABSTRACT: We consider a periodic review inventory system for perishable items with lost sales. Demands arrive according to a Poisson process. The lifetime of each item is exponentially distributed and the procurement lead time is constant. This type of modeling is motivated by the recent application of the so called Time Temperature Technologies. With this technology, it is possible to detect a...

In this paper, we deal with the problem of a fixed number of units of a certain perishable commodity over a continuous time horizon. Airline seats, hotel rooms, advertising space in newspapers, and some seasonal products that must be sold before the end of the season are examples of such commodities that cannot be carried over and are not storable for consumers. This paper considers such a prob...

This paper investigates repetitive purchase decisions of perishable items in the face of uncertain demand (the newsvendor problem). The experimental design includes: high, or low profit levels; and uniform, or normal demand distributions. The results show that in all cases both learning and convergence occur and are effected by: (1) the mean demand; (2) the order-size of the maximal expected pr...

A disaster inventory system is considered in which two substitutable items are stored for disaster management. In the event of disaster management, a particular product may become stock-out and the situation warrants that a demand for the particular product during its stock-out period may be substituted with another available similar product in the inventory. From the utility point of view, con...

A growing body of literature shows that endowing a mobile robot with semantic knowledge, and with the ability to reason from this knowledge, can greatly increase its capabilities. In this paper, we explore a novel use of semantic knowledge: we encode information about how things should be, or norms, to allow the robot to infer deviations from these norms and to generate goals to correct these d...

In this paper we propose a methodology to set prices of perishable items in the context of a retail chain with coordinated prices among its stores and compare its performance with actual practice in a real case study. We formulate a stochastic dynamic programming problem and develop heuristic solutions that approximate optimal solutions satisfactorily. To compare this methodology with current p...