Joint optimization of inventory planning, maintenance policy and pricing for perishable complementary products by considering the product freshness and technology level

An efficient inventory system is considerably affected by two important factors including the demand and production rates. The value of demand rate depends on the product’s price and the customer waiting time for product while the production rate is dependent on the maintenance strategy. Taking into account the production process of two perishable complementary products, a hybrid model by integration of inventory planning, pricing and maintenance policies is proposed in this paper. The proposed model considers both the freshness and the technology level used in production process in which the former has a great impact on demand for perishable products, while the latter has a crucial impact on component’s failures. To elaborate the capability of the proposed mathematical model, three illustrative examples are considered. The first example proves the importance of implementing maintenance strategy to maximize the manufacturer's total profit. The second study explores the impact of product’s perishability on the manufacturer's profit under various perishing coefficients while the third one indicates the importance of taking the product’s freshness into account on the value of exact profit. The sensitivity analysis is undertaken to study how the objective function and decision variables can be affected by the model parameters.