Title: An inventory model with shortages for imperfect items using substitution of two products

Authors: Arindum Mukhopadhyay; A. Goswami

Addresses: Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management Shillong, Shillong-793014, India ' Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur-721302, India

Abstract: Inventory models with imperfect quality items are studied by researchers in the past two decades. Till now none of them have considered the effect of substitutions to cope up with shortage and avoid lost sales. This paper presents an EOQ approach for inventory system with shortages and two types of products with imperfect quality by one way substitution. Our model provides significant advantage for substitution case while maintaining its inherent simplicity. We have provided numerical example and sensitivity analysis to justify the effectiveness of our model. It is observed that the presence of imperfect items affect the lot size of minor and major products differently. Under certain conditions, our model generalises the previous existing models in this direction.

Keywords: inventory; EOQ; imperfect quality; substitution; shortages.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2017.086525

International Journal of Operational Research, 2017 Vol.30 No.2, pp.193 - 219

Received: 22 Apr 2014
Accepted: 01 Mar 2015

Published online: 12 Sep 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article