Demand Forecasting and Inventory Management of Perishable Inventory - with a Focus on Blood Platelet Transfusions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inventory management of perishable products has seen extensive study over the years; the perishable nature capturing the real-world phenomena of expiration after a limited shelf life. Such problems are challenging as they involve balancing demand fulfillment with minimal wastage. An added dimension to such problems, given the rise of machine learning, is to estimate future demand. Demand forecasts can be helpful for decision making, in particular they can be used for finding the optimal ordering quantity for the products. The central thesis of this dissertation is that by forecasting the demand and utilizing it in the inventory management process, we can build a more robust inventory system that takes additional information into consideration when making decisions. Firstly, five different demand forecasting methods, ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average), Prophet, lasso regression (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator), random forest, and LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks are utilized and evaluated via a rolling window method. Subsequently, we study the structural properties of the optimal ordering policy for perishable products with fixed shelf lives in a periodic-review single-item inventory system over a finite horizon, where demand forecasts are available. The objective is to find the optimal ordering policy that minimizes the total expected cost, consisting of a linear ordering cost, inventory holding cost, wastage cost, and shortage cost, over a finite horizon. We show that the optimal policy is a state-dependent base-stock policy in which the base-stock values are a function of the system’s state, the inventory level, a vector of current and previous demand forecasts, and previous demand values. Moreover, we explore the monotonicity properties of the optimal policy. The monotonicity properties motivate us to propose a heuristic in which the order quantity is an affine function of the inventory level and forecast-dependent target inventory levels. We evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic on platelet transfusion data for hospitals in Hamilton, Ontario. Experimental results show that the proposed heuristic is effective in minimizing the total cost while maintaining low on-hand inventory levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".