Production planning and inventory control with remanufacturing and disposal

In this paper we consider a stochastic inventory system with production, remanufacturing, and disposal operations. Customer demands must either be fulfilled from the production of new products or by the remanufacturing of used products. Used products are either remanufactured or disposed of. To coordinate production, remanufacturing and disposal operations efficiently, we extend the PUSH and PULL strategies that Van der Laan et al. developed to control a system in which all returned products are remanufactured and no planned disposals occur. The other contributions of this paper are to indicate when and why planned disposals are economically beneficial, and to compare the PUSH-disposal strategy to the PULL disposal strategy. In addition, we investigate the robustness of the control parameters of the PUSH-and PULL-disposal strategy over the different stages of a product life-cycle. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.