Managing dynamic inventory systems with product returns: a Markov decision process (Q353190)

From the author's abstract: The paper presents a Markovian decision process for managing inventory systems with Markovian customer demand and Markovian products returns. Employing functional analysis, the author proves the existence of the optimal replenishment policies for the discount-cost and average-cost problem when demand, returns, and cost functions are of polynomial growth. The considered model generalizes literature results by integrating Markovian-demands, Markovian-returns, and positive replenishment lead time.