An inventory system for perishable commodities (PIS) with finite shelf size and finite waiting room for demands is studied; the maximum shelf life and the maximum waiting time of a demand are assumed to be either constant or exponentially distributed, and the arrival rates for items and for...

We present models for inventory systems with perishable commodities (PISs) in which the items are not scrapped after reaching their maximum lifetime but are transferred to a second PIS where they are used to satisfy another random stream of demands. We determine the steady-state distribution of...

We consider a certain class of perishable inventory systems with items and demands arriving at random times. The shelf lifetime of every item is finite and deterministic. Every demand is for a single item and is satisfied by the oldest item on the shelf, if available. Generalizing previous work,...

The following variant of a classical selection problem is considered. Offers of random size are successively available to a decision-maker at discrete time instants, and he has to select one without having the possibility of recall. At any time he can accept or reject the current offer based on...

The aim of this paper is to solve the basic stochastic shortest-path problem (SSPP) for Markov chains (MCs) with countable state space and then apply the results to a class of nearest-neighbor MCs on the lattice state space $$\mathbb Z \times \mathbb Z $$ whose only moves are one step up, down,...

We consider two locations in tandem of an inventory model, so-called the buffer and the store. The content levels in both locations are controlled simultaneously by transferring inventory from the buffer location to the store location. Under a certain cost function that takes into account the...

This paper is an in-depth treatment of an inventory control problem with perishable items. We focus on two prototypes of perishability for items that have a common shelflife and that arrive in batches with zero lead time: (i) sudden deaths due to disasters (e.g., spoilage because of extreme...

The G/M/1 queue is one of the classical models of queueing theory. The goal of this paper is two-fold: (a) To introduce new derivations of some well-known results, and (b) to present some new results for the G/M/1 queue and its variants. In particular, we pay attention to the G/M/1 queue with a...