An improved ordering and recovery policy for reusable items

This paper studies a joint EOQ and EPQ model in which a stationary demand can be satisfied by recycled products as well as newly purchased products. The model assumes that a fixed quantity of the used products are collected from customers and later recovered for reuse. The recovered products are regarded as perfectly new ones. We also assume that the number of orders for newly purchasing items and the number of recovery setups in a cycle can be mutually independent integers. Under these assumptions, we develop an optimization model obtaining the economic order quantity for newly procured products, the optimal lot size for the recovery process, and the sequence of the orders and the setups, simultaneously. And then a simple solution procedure to find a local optimal control parameter set is proposed. To validate the model and the solution procedure, finally, some computational experiments are presented.