Inventory control in hybrid systems with remanufacturing

This paper is on production planning and inventory control in systems where manufacturing and remanufacturing operations occur simultaneously. Typical for these hybrid systems is, that both the output of the manufacturing pro cess and the output of the remanufacturing process can be used to fulfill c ustomer demands. Here, we consider a relatively simple hybrid system, relat ed to a single component durable product. For this system, we present a met hodology to analyse a PUSH control strategy tin which all returned products are remanufactured as early as possible) and a PULL control strategy tin w hich all returned products are remanufactured as late as is convenient). Th e main contributions of this paper are (i) to compare traditional systems w ithout remanufacturing to PUSH and to PULL controlled systems with remanufa cturing, and (ii) to derive managerial insights into the inventory related effects of remanufacturing.