A dynamic remanufacturing planning problem with discount purchasing options

This paper considers a remanufacturing and purchasing planning problem, in which either used products(or wastes) are remanufactured or remanufactured products(or final products) are purchased to satisfy dynamic demands of remanufactured products over a discrete and finite time horizon. Also, as remanufactured products are purchased more than or equal to a special quantity Q, a discount price policy is applied. The problem assumes that the related cost (remanufacturing and inventory holding costs of used products, and the purchasing and inventory holding costs of remanufactured products) functions are concave and backlogging is not allowed. The objective of this paper is to determine the optimal remanufacturing and purchasing policy that minimizes the total cost to satisfy dynamic demands of remanufactured products. This paper characterizes the properties of the optimal policy and then, based on these properties, presents a dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal policy. Also, a network-based procedure is proposed for the case of a large quantity of low cost used products. A numerical example is then presented to demonstrate the procedure of the proposed algorithm.