Perishable inventory systems with variable input and demand rates (Q706381)

This article deals with a class of queueing-based perishable inventory models, which are linked to queues with reneging customers. The life time of each item is deterministic and is assumed, without loss of genrality, to be one time unit. Unit demands arrive at random times and are either satisfied by the oldest item on the shelf or are lost, if the system is empty. The input and/or demand rates depend on the current state of virtual outdating time (VOT), defined as the remaining time until the currently oldest item on the shelf would be scrapped, if no demands arrived before. The steady-state distribution of the VOT and the generating function of the number of items on the shelf are derived for the three cases, viz., (i) Markovian input and demand (ii) Renewal input and Markovian demand (iii) Markovian input and renewal demand. The connection between these models with those in the queueing literature is also pointed out.