In the last two decades, product recovery systems have received increasing attention due to several reasons such as new governmental regulations and economic advantages. One of the most important activities of these systems is to assign returned products to suitable reverse manufacturing alternatives. Uncertainty of returned products in terms of quantity, quality, and time complicates the decis...

We present a family of unimodal maps, arising from a simple queueing model, which exhibits reverse bifurcations. We compare and contrast this with bifurcations occurring in the well-known logistic family of unimodal quadratic maps.

In this paper, we discuss the problem and challenge for the reverse logistics of the publishing industry in China. First we present the background of the publishing industry in China through analyzing the statistics data of the past 8 years. Then we point out the existing problems and the underlying reasons. Finally we propose our solution and suggestions to cope with the existing problems, inc...

An adaptive control of a reverse logistic inventory system with unknown deterioration and disposal rates is considered. An adaptive control approach with a feedback is applied to track the inventory levels toward their goal levels. Also, the updating rules of both deterioration and disposal rates are derived from the conditions of asymptotic stability of the reference model. Important character...

University bookstores have a complex multi-product, multi-supplier supply chain with complex channel relationships such as product substitution, random yields, reverse logistics and returns, and risk sharing contracts. Supply chain efficiency is important to the bookstore due to low overall profit margin. The used book buyback activity is an example of reverse logistics with random yield with s...

Covariate dependent Markov models dealing with estimation of transition probabilities for higher orders appear to be restricted because of over-parameterization. An improvement of the previous methods for handling runs of events by expressing the conditional probabilities in terms of the transition probabilities generated from Markovian assumptions was proposed using Chapman-Kolmogorov equation...

With accelerating technological changes and market expansions of electrical and electronic products (EEPs) during the last few decades, much focus and effort have been placed on the waste of these products. In order to reduce their negative impacts on the environment and human, at the end of their product lifecycles, their wastes need to be properly handled, processed, disposed, and if applicab...