Inventory strategies for systems with fast remanufacturing

We describe hybrid manufacturing/remanufacturing systems with a long lead time for remanufacturing and a short lead time for manufacturing. We review the classes of inventory strategies for hybrid systems in the literature. These are all based on equal lead times. For systems with slow manufacturing and fast remanufacturing, we propose a new class. An extensive numerical experiment shows that the optimal strategy in the new class almost always performs better and often much better than the optimal strategies in all other classes.