Dynamic Inventory Management And Quality Control For Perishable Product

In recent years,providing a frame to understand the effect of consumer behavior on the pricing and inventory control policy for perishable product has received a great deal of attention of the researchers from operations management area.The main contents of this dissertation are as follows:An optimal control model on temperature control for quality of perishable foods is presented,in which the quality deteriorates according to the first-order reaction and the temperature is defined as a control variable.To minimize the total cost,the optimal temperature is obtained with Pontryagin's maximum principle.It is strictly proved that the isotherm condition of storage is optimal,which can be implemented conveniently in practice and improve the economic benefits of enterprises.A dynamic pricing problem for deteriorating items with the consumers' reference-price effect is studied.An optimal control model is established to maximise the total profit.The necessary condition for the optimal strategy is given and the optimal pricing strategy with reference-price effect is obtained.The results show that when consumers' ability to remember past price is strong,the firm can apply an increasing selling price policy.When consumers' memory becomes weak,the firms should reduce price first and then increase price over time throughout the following planning horizon.When consumers are not sensitive to the past selling price,the firms should apply markdown pricing policy throughout the planning horizonA problem of joint pricing and dynamic product quality investment with consumers' reference quality effect with the existence of quality inflation is studied.An optimal control models are constructed to maximize the total profit with a limited quality investment capacity.The optimal quality investment strategies for finite and infinite planning horizon are given,respectively.In addition,an effective algorithm is designed to generate the optimal joint pricing and dynamic quality investment policy for the system.The main difference between the strategy of finite planning horizon and that of infinite planning horizon is that the latter is a constant.This study indicates that it is never optimal for firm to increase quality investment all the way throughout the planning horizon.The level of quality investment is higher when taking into account the impact of reference quality.A problem of supply chain pricing and coordination with mark-down policy in the presence of conspicuous consumption is studied.The optimal pricing strategies for the integrated supply chain and decentralized supply chain are derived respectively.The results show that an anticipated conspicuous consumption can benefit the supply chain even though the conspicuous consumption aggravates the double marginalisation effect.In addition,the results indicate that the supply chain can benefit from rationing.Also,a revenue sharing contract is introduced and it is proved that this contract can be applied to coordinate the supply chain with conspicuous consumption.The results also demonstrates that coordination requires a wholesale price less than the manufacturer's production cost.