Modelling the impact of demand disruptions on two warehouse perishable inventory policy amid COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

The proposed work considers two different scenarios of a finite period complete-lockdown situation for two warehouse perishable inventory systems. The first scenario assumed the enforcement and ease of lockdown when the owned warehouse is being vacated. The latter studied the scenario using lockdown enforcement during the inventory dispatch from the owned warehouse and relieved as the items are taken from the rented warehouse. These deterministic models consider a time-dependent linear demand rate and two parameters Weibull distributed deterioration rate. The linearly increasing demand function decreases by a finite volume as the lockdown is imposed and increases suddenly whenever the lockdown is relaxed. Both of the models have been formulated to minimise the total system cost. Further, the behaviour of the models has been examined using sensitivity analysis. Considering the realistic scenarios makes the models practicable to implement in a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.