A lateral transshipment model for perishable inventory management
针对易腐品提出一个包含变质成本的横向转运模型，通过超市案例发现，变质成本高时需要更低的转运成本才能触发转运决策，但满足条件时转运仍是降低总库存成本的有效策略。
Since inventory costs account for half of logistics costs, optimal inventory management to minimise total inventory costs remains a sustainable competitive advantage. Lateral transshipment (LT) is evidently a proven strategy to minimise total inventory costs. The additional LT costs are more than compensated by lowering the stock-out costs. Previous LT models have not been applied to perishable products. Our proposed LT model embodies spoilage costs in the total inventory costs function with the other cost components (purchase from a regular supplier, LT, backordering and holding), and optimises the trade-off among these five key cost components. Numerical examples from a supermarket chain case study demonstrate that, as compared against the no or lower spoilage costs scenarios, lower LT costs are required to trigger the decision point for implementing LT in the higher spoilage costs scenario. However, common to both the with and without spoilage costs scenarios, LT is still the preferred strategy to minimise total inventory costs, given the decision rules are satisfied.