The interest for the development of new active packaging materials has rapidly increased in the last few years. Antimicrobial active packaging is a potential alternative to protect perishable products during their preparation, storage and distribution to increase their shelf-life by reducing bacterial and fungal growth. This review underlines the most recent trends in the use of new edible coat...

We develop the first approximation algorithm for periodic-review perishable inventory systems with setup costs. The ordering lead time is zero. The model allows for correlated demand processes which generalize the well-known approaches to model dynamic demand forecast updates. The structure of optimal policies for this fundamental class of problems is not known in the literature. Thus, finding ...

A group of risk-averse agents repeatedly produce a perishable consumption good; individual outputs are observable but efforts are not. The contracting problem admits a recursive formulation, and the optimal value function is the fixed point of a contraction mapping. When the agents can be punished to the full extent in a single period, every continuation contract of an optimal contract is itsel...

This paper offers an alternative approach to the existence of sunspot equilibria. The economy has a single perishable good and fiat money within an overlapping generations framework with two possible extraneous events. The analysis uses the dynamic adjustment of market prices during voluntary trade to establish paths of current spot prices whose limit points are rational expectations equilibria...

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proven to be an effective, general-purpose technology develop ‘good’ replenishment policies in inventory management. We show how transfer from existing, well-performing heuristics may stabilize the training process and improve performance of DRL control. While idea is general, we specifically implement potential-based reward shaping a deep Q-network algorit...