Policies for Inventory Models with Product Returns Forecast from Past Demands and Past Sales

Finite horizon periodic review backlog models are considered in this paper for an inventory system that remanufactures two types of cores: buyback cores and normal cores. Returns of used products as buyback cores are modelled to depend on past demands and past sales. We obtain an optimal inventory policy for the model in which returns … Read more

Infinite horizon optimal policy for an inventory system with two types of products sharing common hardware platforms

We consider a periodic review inventory system and present its optimal policy in the infinite horizon setting. The optimal inventory policy that maximizes the infinite horizon expected discount profit for the model is analytically obtained by relating to the finite horizon setting using results from variational analysis. Results are provided that elucidate the operations of … Read more

A Robust Optimization Framework for Analyzing Distribution Systems with Transshipment

This paper studies a distribution system consisting of multiple retail locations with transshipment operations among the retailers. Due to the difficulty in computing the optimal solution imposed by the transshipment operations and in estimating shortage cost from a practical perspective, we propose a robust optimization framework for analyzing the impact of transshipment operations on such … Read more