Pricing and inventory control decisions in the stochastic hybrid production systems with multiple recovery options

Although pricing and inventory control are crucial decisions in each production system, these decisions are usually investigated separately. This paper considers pricing and inventory control decisions simultaneously in a hybrid production system. The hybrid production system has two recovery options, remanufacturing and refurbishing sites. The demand follows Poisson distribution, which depends on the sale price of each product. Returned products arrive according to a Poisson process. Each returned product can be remanufactured, refurbished, or disposed. The time to manufacturing, refurbishing, and remanufacturing a product also follows an exponential distribution. By modeling the system as a Markov chain, the long-run expected profit function is obtained in terms of the dispose-down-to level of returned products and the order-up-to level and the sale price of serviceable products. A three-dimensional state space of the Markov Chain dependent to the sale price is developed considering pricing and inventory control decisions simultaneously with remanufacturing and refurbishing returned products. Since the model is a mixed integer nonlinear programming and known as complex models, the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, simulation and complete search method are used to solve the problem. The results show that by increasing the purchase price of the returned products, the amount of returned products will increase. If the refurbishing cost of the returned products is high or the disposal cost is low, less inventory should be kept in the system with a high price of serviceable products. If the lost sale cost is high, the more inventory should be maintained. Moreover, by decreasing the price elasticity of demand, the customer's demand increases, and then more inventory should be maintained in the system.