Online and offline container purchasing and repositioning problem

We study the management of containers in a logistic chain between a supplier and a manufacturer in a ramp-up scenario where the demand is stochastic and expected to increase. This paper extends our previous study with deterministic demand. We consider a periodic review system with T periods of R time steps. The supplier sends full containers at every step and receives empty containers every period. We consider positive lead times. To face demand increase, the manufacturer can purchase reusable containers at a setup cost while the supplier can buy single-use disposables. Using a dynamic programming framework, we develop an online exact algorithm and an offline heuristic.