Capacitated dynamic production and remanufacturing planning under demand and return uncertainty

This paper considers a stochastic dynamic multi-product capacitated lot sizing problem with remanufacturing. Finished goods come from two sources: a standard production resource using virgin material and a remanufacturing resource that processes recoverable returns. Both the period demands and the inflow of returns are random. For this integrated stochastic production and remanufacturing problem, we propose a nonlinear model formulation that is approximated by sample averages and a piecewise linear approximation model. In the first approach, the expected values of random variables are replaced by sample averages. The idea of the piecewise linear approximation model is to replace the nonlinear functions with piecewise linear functions. The resulting mixed-integer linear programs are solved to create robust (re)manufacturing plans.