Inventory model with the consideration of pricing, product substitution and value deterioration

Abstract

Nowadays, due to the radical development for the e-commerce means, it becomes a trend to buy the products, especially the electronic products, directly from the manufacturers instead of retailers. It is commonly known that each entity in the market has the autonomy to deciding both the production/inventory plan and the pricing plan. Nevertheless, the existing research focuses either on the production planning or pricing. Using such approach can generate optimal solution for production and pricing, but the global optimal solution for integrated production planning and pricing is not guaranteed. Investigating the literature reveals that there are two literature review studies indicate that it is of great important to study the integrated model in production and inventory control problem with perishable and substitutable product. Therefore, this study aims to discuss the aforementioned problem by solving an inventory model with the consideration of pricing, product substitution and value deterioration. For this purpose, we propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming model to represent our inventory model and develop a method to find out the best pricing strategy and its corresponding production plan. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed model, we present an example, the results reveal that our model can efficiently handle the proposed problem.