Optimizing an integrated quality and production-inventory system with perishable seasonal products

The Integrated quality and production-inventory system so far considered in literature usually assumes that item produced by the system have a constant or unidirectional demand pattern. The demand pattern for perishable seasonal product, however, is often a mixture of increasing, steady and decreasing functions of time. This study develops an EPQ model for an imperfect production-inventory system with perishable seasonal products having three-phase ramp-type demand pattern. The system shifts randomly to an out-of-control state during a production run thereby producing some sub-quality items. Classical optimization and trust region methods are used to obtain optimal values of production run time and order quantity followed by numerical experiments and sensitivity analysis.