Transient behaviour and entropy measures on an inventory system with two demand Classes

This article considers a continuous review perishable inventory system that consists of a single server. The customers arriving to the service station belong to any one of two types, that is, type-1 and type-2. The demands from each type of customer arrive according to two independent Poisson processes with different parameters. The life time of each item is assumed to be independently distributed as an exponential. The probability distribution of the inventory level is obtained for both transient and steady-state cases. An entropy-based uncertainty metric for measuring the operating performance is presented. The proposed method offers a practical measure to establish the quality (i.e., dependability) of long-run results for a stocking facility. Various system performance measures are derived, and the total expected cost rate is computed under a suitable cost structure. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.