Periodic review for a perishable item under non stationary stochastic demand

Abstract

We consider the periodic-review, single-location, single-product, production/inventory control problem under non stationary demand and service-level constraints. The product is perishable and has a fixed shelf life. Costs comprise fixed ordering costs and inventory holding costs. For this inventory system we discuss a number of control policies that may be adopted. For one of these policies, we assess the quality of an approximate Constraint Programming (CP) model for computing near optimum policy parameters.