Research on inventory management for muti-species systems with returns

In order to seek an effective strategy for muti-species system with returns, we study the system experiencing certain returns as well as certain customer demands. For general muti-species inventory systems, we propose two ordering policies. One is unified replenishment and the other is integrated replenishment. For the second policy, we give a simple heuristics solution, and in numerical examples it is shown to perform well. From the results of numerical trials, we find that the policy of integrated replenishment is more effective on inventory control than the policy of unified replenishment; and the total average costs of the policy of integrated replenishment are less than the policy of unified replenishment.