Model of an Integrated Procurement-Production System for Food Products Incorporating Quality Loss during Storage Time

Research on procurement-production systems for deteriorating items has been done. The majority of studies assume that the perishable characteristics affect only the quantity of inventoried items. For food products, however, their quantity remains constant during their shelf life period, but the quality deteriorates over time. This paper proposes a new procurement-production model incorporating this situation. The quality change behavior of food products is approached differently depending on their forms either as raw materials or finished goods. As raw materials, the kinetic model is used to represent the quality degradation during storage time, while as finished goods the shelf-life dependent pricing is utilized to describe the value loss due to the quality perception of customers. A mathematical model representing the integrated procurement-production of raw materials and finished goods at a manufacturer is established in this research. The objective is to maximize the total profit per unit time of the system by controlling a number of variables, namely the production cycle (T), the number of raw materials’ procurement over one production cycle (m) and the number of finished goods delivery over one production cycle (n).