On perishable inventory in healthcare: Random expiration dates and age discriminated demand

The aim of the study is to explore how best to mitigate against inventory volatility in perishable inventory, which is characterized by random premature expiration, random demand, irregular supply, age differentiated demand and custom replenishment guidelines. Through the adoption of simulation-optimization along with new settings and replenishment policies, the optimized quantity level of daily orders could be determined for this combination of inventoryrestrictions. Owed to their custom medical compatibility guidelines, and their notable accelerated expiration, blood platelets were considered here. As study outcome, the emergent modelpresents a perspective of supply chains and their healthcare imperatives that will enable healthcare supply chain managers not only to discern, but also to interpret and facilitate the management and implementation of optimal inventories

Rolling-Horizon Heuristics for Capacitated Stochastic Inventory Problems with Forecast Updates

In this paper we propose a practical optimization approach based on the rolling-horizon paradigm to address general single-product periodic-review inventory control problems. Our framework supports many constraints and requirements that are found in real inventory problems and does not rely on any assumption on the statistical distribution of random variables. Ambiguous demand and costs, forecast updates, constant lead time, lost sales, flexible inventory capacity and product availability can all be taken into account. Three, increasingly sophisticated, solution methods are proposed and implemented within our optimization framework: a myopic policy, a linear programming model with risk penalization and a scenario-based stochastic programming model. The effectiveness of our approach is proved using a dataset of realistic instances