An Inventory Control System for Remanufacture with Disposal

In recent decades, for the pressure of the environmental legislations, the economical interesting and the conscious of environment, many producers have to take their products back after used. The product tackback (PTB) program would bring economic burden to the producers, while many of the returned products have economic value and could be remanufactured to satisfy the market demand. Inventory management is an essential area in the remanufacturing process. In this paper, we extend the traditional (s,Q) inventory strategy to an (s_p ,Q,s_d) inventory control model for product remanufacture with disposal. We assume that the return and demand are independent Poisson process, and derive the exact expression of expected average total cost under this strategy. By means of numerical simulation we find the optimal control parameter under different situation and investigate the effects of different cost parameters