Dynamic Lot Sizing With Multiple Age‐Differentiated Demands of a Perishable Product
研究了制造商生产易腐产品并供应给多个对新鲜度有不同要求的客户时，如何联合决策生产与库存分配以最小化总成本，并提出了多项式时间最优算法。
ABSTRACT In this paper, we study a dynamic lot sizing problem in which a manufacturer produces a perishable product and supplies it to several customers, each having a different requirement on the product freshness and only accepting inventory stock whose age is not older than a customer‐dependent threshold. Both production and inventory holding cost functions are assumed to be concave. The manufacturer makes joint production and inventory allocation decisions to minimize the total cost. We explore structural properties and develop an optimal algorithm for solving the problem in polynomial time. More efficient optimal algorithms are also developed for two important special cases. We conduct computational experiments to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the commercial solver CPLEX. Through computational experiments, we also obtain managerial insights into the bottleneck customer, who has the highest freshness requirement.