Adjusting Remanufacturing Capacity Using Sales and Return Information
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This paper considers a multi-period capacity adjustment problem for remanufacturing a product with a limited lifecycle. Product returns constitute a demand for remanufacturing capacity. Utilizing sales history, the problem is to determine a capacity expansion and contraction policy that maximizes the expected net revenue from remanufactured products minus all the capacity-related costs. We assume that when the returns surpass the available capacity levels then it is required to expand capacity to meet the shortage on an emergency basis. Using a Markov decision process, we formulate the current capacity level and the current number of items sold but not yet returned as the state variable. We describe a simple optimal policy of capacity expansion and contraction for the single period using properties of K-concave functions. The policy consists of threshold values and target levels that depend on the number of items yet to be returned.
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This proceeding is published as Chittamvanich, Suphalat, and Sarah M. Ryan. "Adjusting Remanufacturing Capacity Using Sales and Return Information." In Proceedings of the 2006 IIE Annual Conference and Exposition. (2006). May 20-24, 2006. Orlando, Florida, USA. Posted with permission.