Due to the emergence of e-commerce and the proliferation of liberal return policies, product returns have become daily routines for many companies. Considering the significant impact of product returns on the company’s bottom line, a growing number of companies have attempted to streamline the reverse logistics process. Products are usually returned to initial collection points (ICPs) in small ...

We study a single-product single-location inventory system under periodic review, where excess demand is lost and the replenishment lead time is positive. The performance measure of interest is the long run average holding cost and lost sales penalty. For a large class of demand distributions, we show that when the lost sales penalty becomes large compared to the holding cost, the relative diff...

When an agent fails to make an object function properly, there are two possibilities: the agent did something wrong or something is wrong with the object. As in all problems of confounding, these hypotheses can be disambiguated by varying one factor and holding the other constant: in this case, either by holding the object constant and varying the agent (e.g., by asking for help from others) or...

In this paper, the problem of nonfragile reliable guaranteed cost control for networked control systems with time-varying sampling period sensors and actuator failures is concerned for a given quadratic cost function. For linear time-invariant controlled plant, under the assumption that the sampling period is time-varying within a certain known bound, the time delay is constant and shorter than...

The formation of network structure is mainly influenced by an individual node’s activity and its memory, where activity can usually be interpreted as the individual inherent property and memory can be represented by the interaction strength between nodes. In our study, we define the activity through the appearance pattern in the time-aggregated network representation, and quantify the memory th...