The aim of this article is to derive the income and cost functionals
required to determine the actuarial value of certain types of
perishable inventory system. In the basic model, the arrival times of
the items to be stored and the ones of the demands for those items form
independent Poisson processes. The shelf lifetime of every item is
finite and deterministic. Every demand is for a single item and is
satisfied by the oldest item on the shelf, if available. The price of
an item depends on its shelf age. For an actuarial valuation, it is
important to know the distribution of the total value of the items in
the system and the expected (discounted) total income and cost
generated by the system when in steady state. All of these functionals
are determined explicitly. As extensions of the original model, we also
deal with the case of batch arrivals and general renewal interdemand
times; in both cases, closed-form solutions are obtained.