An inventory rotation mechanism for relief supplies considering recycling and remanufacturing

Abstract

Relief supply inventories are important in disaster response operations. To address the problem of dead stocks and avoid relief supply expiration, such inventories must be renewed periodically. Different from the traditional shelf-life rotation mechanism (i.e. renewal of the entire inventory at the expiration date), which pays more attention to decreasing the quantity of dead stocks, the novel period rotation mechanism that we design in this study will gradually rotate relief supplies according to their shelf life. We propose a mathematical programming model to minimise the total cost of relief organisations and conduct a case study and analyse the sensitivity of key parameters using real-world data. Results show that our rotation mechanism can substantially reduce the financial burden on relief organisations and improve the quality of relief supplies for victims. The novelty of our study includes: (1) We introduce a new approach that can rotate multiple times, through which we consider the quality of relief supplies; (2) We incorporate recycling and remanufacturing into the rotation process; and (3) We adopt an inductive reasoning method to develop the model with demand and time uncertainties. We prove the feasibility of our model and contributions of our study to humanitarian logistics practice and research.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarian logistics
• inventory rotation
• recycling and remanufacturing
• Inductive reasoning
• Long-term cooperation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used to support the findings of this study are included in the article.

Notes

1 url: www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-07/28/5095541/files/50f46dff8d024193b31b6c79f3d26ecc.pdf

2 url: http://tf.121.com.cn/index.html

Additional information

Funding

The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 72201255, 72071189, and 72188101], and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number WK2040000052].

Notes on contributors

Xihui Wang

Xihui Wang is a professor in the Management Department at University of Science and Technology of China. He has been engaged in operation research and disaster management for ten years. His research work involves supply chain management, disaster management and humanitarian logistics. He has made rich research achievements in the allocation optimisation of disaster relief resources, coordination mechanism, humanitarian logistics objective function. Two papers have been published in Productions and Operations Management, and dozens of papers in Omega, Annals of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Economics and the other journals.

Anqi Zhu

Anqi zhu is a doctoral student majoring in Management Science and Engineering from University of Science and Technology of China, one of China's top-ranked universities. Her research focuses on humanitarian logistics.

Yu Fan

Yu Fan is an experienced researcher that specialises in operation research and disaster management. He has a PhD in management science from University of Science and Technology of China, one of China's top-ranked universities. He has been part of the Special Class for Gifted Young since 16 years old, displaying excellence in statistics and mathematics. His research interests include humanitarian logistics, disaster management, and equity in optimisation. He has published papers in high-level journals such as Production and Operations Management and International Journal of Production Economics. He has worked closely with international research teams, such as INSEAD's Humanitarian Research Group.

Liang Liang

Liang Liang is a Professor in the Management Department at University of Science and Technology of China. His research areas are decision analysis and supply chain management, etc. His representative research result is the combination of game theory and data envelopment analysis to study the equilibrium problem of cross-efficiency. In recent years, he has published more than 50 papers in Operations Research, Journal of Operations Management, IEEE Transaction on SMC, OMEGA, IIE Transactions, Naval Research Logistics and other international academic journals.