Asymptotic Optimality of Base-Stock Policies for Perishable Inventory Systems

We consider periodic review perishable inventory systems with a fixed product lifetime. Unsatisfied demand can be either lost or backlogged. The objective is to minimize the long-run average holding, penalty, and outdating cost. The optimal policy for these systems is notoriously complex and computationally intractable because of the curse of dimensionality. Hence, various heuristic replenishment policies are proposed in the literature, including the base-stock policy, which raises the total inventory level to a constant in each review period. Whereas various studies show near-optimal numerical performances of base-stock policies in the classic system with zero replenishment lead time and a first-in-first-out issuance policy, the results on their theoretical performances are very limited. In this paper, we first focus on this classic system and show that a simple base-stock policy is asymptotically optimal when any one of the product lifetime, demand population size, unit penalty cost, and unit outdating cost becomes large; moreover, its optimality gap converges to zero exponentially fast in the first two parameters. We then study two important extensions. For a system under a last-in-first-out or even an arbitrary issuance policy, we prove that a simple base-stock policy is asymptotically optimal with large product lifetime, large unit penalty costs, and large unit outdating costs, and for a backlogging system with positive lead times, we prove that our results continue to hold with large product lifetime, large demand population sizes, and large unit outdating costs. Finally, we provide a numerical study to demonstrate the performances of base-stock policies in these systems. This paper was accepted by Victor Martinez de Albéniz, operations management.