We consider a dynamic lot sizing model in which end products to satisfy demands are obtained by remanufacturing m types of cores, where m ≥ 1, or manufacturing from raw materials, and in the model, we have separate setup costs for manufacturing and remanufacturing. As is widely known, remanufacturing is an environmental preferable choice compared with manufacturing. In view of this, we design a feasible policy for our model, which can be found in polynomial time, that prioritizes remanufacturing over manufacturing. We argue that the feasible policy does not lead to high total system cost by providing an upper bound on the ratio between the two costs under a reasonable assumption on returns as cores, which is then used to show desirable properties of the feasible policy compared to the optimal policy in total system cost. We also provide numerical results for instances of the model that show that the feasible policy can be found quickly, and also indicate that the cost under the feasible policy does not deviate too far from the optimal cost for reasonable parameter values of our model.
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