Title: Complete search procedure for replenishment and collection policies in a product life cycle for a retailer

Authors: Tzu-Chun Weng

Addresses: Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract: In this paper, assuming the retailer is responsible for used-product collection, we investigate replenishment and collection policies by considering a general, time-varying, continuous, and deterministic demand function for a product life cycle. The objection is to optimally determine the number of inventory replenishments, the inventory replenishment time points, and the return rates of used-product in the product life cycle by minimising the total relevant cost of the inventory replenishment and used-product collection system. A complete search procedure is developed to find the optimal solution by employing the properties derived in this paper and the well-known Nelder-Mead algorithm. Also, numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the features of the proposed problem discussed in this paper.

Keywords: replenishment policies; used-product collection; product life cycle; collection policies; retail industry; retailing; inventory replenishments; used products; inventory management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2016.075518

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2016 Vol.8 No.3, pp.293 - 311

Received: 19 May 2014
Accepted: 17 Aug 2014
Published online: 28 Mar 2016 *

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