We study an inventory control problem of a perishable product with a fixed short shelf life in Dutch retail practice. The demand is non-stationary during the week but stationary over the weeks, with mixed LIFO and FIFO withdrawal. The supermarket uses a service level requirement. A difficulty is that the age-distribution of products in stock is not always known. Hence, the challenge is to derive practical and efficient order policies that deal with situations where this information is either available or lacking. We present the optimal policy in case the age distribution is known, and compare it with benchmarks from literature. Three heuristics have been developed that do not require product age information, to align with the situation in practice. Subsequently, the performance of the heuristics is evaluated using demand patterns from practice. It appears that the so-called STIP heuristic (S for Total estimated Inventory of Perishables) provides the lowest cost and waste levels. PDF  XML

中文翻译：

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零售易腐产品的订购政策

我们研究了荷兰零售业中具有固定短保质期的易腐产品的库存控制问题。需求在一周内是不稳定的，但在几周内是稳定的，混合了 LIFO 和 FIFO 提款。超市使用服务级别要求。困难在于库存产品的年龄分布并不总是已知的。因此，面临的挑战是得出实用且有效的订单政策，以处理这些信息可用或缺乏的情况。我们在年龄分布已知的情况下提出最优策略，并将其与文献中的基准进行比较。已经开发了三种不需要产品年龄信息的启发式方法，以符合实践中的情况。随后，使用实践中的需求模式评估启发式的性能。似乎所谓的 STIP 启发式（S 代表易腐物品的总估计库存）提供了最低的成本和浪费水平。PDF文件