Ordering policies for heterogeneous platelets demand with unreliable supply and substitution
研究了医院面临两种不同年龄血小板随机需求时的库存模型，发现用年轻血小板替代无年龄偏好需求可降低成本、提高服务水平，但年轻血小板供应不可靠时替代效果下降。
This paper develops an inventory model for a hospital that faces two stochastic and heterogeneous demands by platelet age. Demand substitution by using young platelets to satisfy the demand for platelets without age preference is possible. Through impact analysis, we find that substitution can improve the service level and reduce the expected overall cost. When the supply of young platelets is either entirely reliable or entirely unreliable, the hospital can provide a higher service level at a lower cost. During such periods of time, the substitution performance is higher than that when the supply of young platelets has a probability of being unreliable. High demand fluctuation leads to a high cost. When the demand fluctuation of young platelets is moderate, numerical analysis shows that substitution can achieve excellent performance with a reduction in expected cost of more than 5%.