Abstract
The effect of lead time plays an important role in inventory management. It is also important to study the optimal strategies when the lead time is not precisely known to the decision makers. The aim of this paper is to examine the inventory model for deteriorating items with fuzzy lead time, negative exponential demand, and partially backlogged shortages. This model is unique in its nature due to probabilistic deterioration along with fuzzy lead time. The fuzzy lead time is assumed to be triangular, parabolic, trapezoidal numbers and the graded mean integration representation method is used for the defuzzification purpose. Moreover, three different types of probability distributions, namely uniform, triangular and Beta are used for rate of deterioration to find optimal time and associated total inventory cost. The developed model is validated numerically and values of optimal time and total inventory cost are given in tabular form, corresponding to different probability distribution and fuzzy lead-time. The sensitivity analysis is performed on variation of key parameters to observe its effect on the developed model. Graphical representations are also given in support of derived optimal inventory cost vs. time.