The Value of Sampling Inspection in a Single-Period Remanufacturing System with Stochastic Returns Yield

We examine a reverse supply chain consisting of a collection site, where consumers return used products, and a remanufacturing facility. Some of the returned products are transported to the remanufacturing facility in order to be remanufactured and used to satisfy the stochastic demand for remanufactured products. The quality of returns is characterized by uncertainty, and therefore, before the procurement quantity determination, the remanufacturer has the alternative to inspect a sample drawn from the collected quantity in order to evaluate more accurately returns’ quality. Using general assumptions for returns quality and remanufactured products demand distributions, we formulate the expected profit function for both sampling and no-sampling cases and we examine numerically the economic effectiveness of sampling. A key characteristic of the current paper is that returns’ yield is expressed as the probability of a unit to be remanufacturable.