Coordination of manufacturing, remanufacturing and returns acceptance in a hybrid production-inventory system
Résumé
This paper studies the coordination of manufacturing, remanufacturing and returns acceptance in a hybrid system. We use a queueing control framework, where manufacturing and remanufacturing are modeled by single servers with exponentially distributed processing times. Customer demands and returned products arrive in the system according to independent Poisson processes. A returned product can be either rejected or accepted. When accepted, a return is placed in a remanufacturable inventory. New products and remanufactured products are placed in a serviceable inventory and customer demands can be satisfied by new products or remanufactured ones. For a cost structure including holding, backorder, manufacturing, admission and rejecting costs, we show that the optimal policy is characterized by two state-dependent base-stock thresholds and one state-dependent acceptance threshold. We also obtain monotonicity results for these switching curves. Then we adapt several heuristic policies from the literature to our model. Finally we carry out a numerical study to compare their performances to the ones of the optimal policy.