In this paper, we address the problem of choosing an appropriate channel for the marketing channel structure of remanufactured fashion products. To be specific, we consider a remanufacturer who has two options for selling the products: (1) provide the remanufactured products to a manufacturer, then the manufacturer sells both new products and the remanufactured products to customers, and (2) sell the remanufactured products directly to customers. Because of the relatively low acceptance of remanufactured products and environment consciousness of customers in developing countries like China, we model the two scenarios as decentralized remanufacturing supply chains, with the manufacturer being the Stackelberg leader and the government offering subsidy to the remanufacturer to incentivize remanufacturing activities. We find that the subsidy can incentivize remanufacturing activity regardless of the remanufacturer’s channel choice. A “too high” or “too low” subsidy makes the remanufacturer compete with the manufacturer, and an intermediate subsidy results in cooperation between the two members of the remanufacturing supply chain. Meanwhile, if the customers’ acceptance for remanufactured products is higher, the remanufacturer will be more likely to compete with the manufacturer. However, the remanufacturer’s optimal channel choice may be inefficient in the sense of social welfare and environmental protection.

This paper addresses the two-echelon capacitated vehicle routing problem (2E-CVRP) with stochastic demands (2E-CVRPSD) in city logistics. A stochastic program with recourse is used to describe the problem. This program aims to minimize the sum of the travel cost and the expected cost of recourse actions resulting from potential route failures. In a two-echelon distribution system, split deliveries are allowed at the first level but not at the second level, thereby increasing the difficulty of calculating the expected failure cost. Three types of routes with or without split deliveries are identified. Different methods are devised or adapted from the literature to compute the failure cost. A genetic-algorithm-based (GA) approach is proposed to solve the 2E-CVRPSD. A simple encoding and decoding scheme, a modified route copy crossover operator, and a satellite-selection-based mutation operator are devised in this approach. The numerical results show that for all instances, the expected cost of the best 2E-CVRPSD solution found by the proposed approach is not greater than that of the best-known 2E-CVRP solution with an average relative gap of 2.57%. Therefore, the GA-based approach can find high-quality solutions for the 2E-CVRPSD.

Under servitization (one paradigm of non-ownership-transfer) business model such as sharing, a manufacturer is responsible not only for product design but also for maintenance. This paper deals with joint decision of product quality and maintenance under servitisation. A model minimising total cost is formulated to obtain the optimal product quality, maintenance effort and maintenance times. We find that the total cost first decreases then increases with product quality, maintenance effort and maintenance times. Moderate quality and maintenance effort level are the best for the manufacturer, because too high or too low quality and effort cause too high total cost. However, preventive maintenance should be implemented as many times as possible until the failure cost is reduced to zero as long as each maintenance can save cost. Moreover, in the optimal joint decision, the product quality, maintenance effort and maintenance times are negatively correlated in pairs. In addition, we explore the impact of unit failure cost, product lifecycle, production cost, maintenance cost, and failure intensity on the manufacturer’s optimal decisions. In extensions, we further take penalty cost, exponential failure distribution, discount rate, and customer usage into account. This paper provides insight for the manufacturer to jointly consider product design and maintenance under servitization.