Queueing-inventory systems with catastrophes under various replenishment policies

Abstract

We discuss two queueing-inventory systems with catastrophes in the warehouse. Catastrophes occur according to the Poisson process and instantly destroy all items in the inventory. The arrivals of the consumer customers follow a Markovian arrival process and they can be queued in an infinite buffer. The service time of a consumer customer follows a phase-type distribution. The system receives negative customers which have Poisson flows and as soon as a negative customer comes into the system, he causes a consumer customer to leave the system, if any. One of two inventory policies is used in the systems: either (s, S) or (s, Q). If the inventory level is zero when a consumer customer arrives, then this customer is either lost (lost sale) or joins the queue (backorder sale). The system is formulated by a four-dimensional continuous-time Markov chain. Ergodicity condition for both systems is established and steady-state distribution is obtained using the matrix-geometric method. By numerical studies, the influence of the distributions of the arrival process and the service time and the system parameters on performance measures are deeply analyzed. Finally, an optimization study is presented in which the criterion is the minimization of expected total costs and the controlled parameter is warehouse capacity.