This paper studies a supply chain consisting of a single vendor and multiple retailers that uses returnable transport items, such as containers or crates, to facilitate shipping products from the vendor to the retailers. The paper considers two different strategies for transporting finished...

This paper studies a two-stage supply chain where returnable transport items (RTIs) are used to ship finished products from the supplier to the buyer. Empty RTIs are collected at the buyer and returned to the supplier. The return time of RTIs is considered to be stochastic in this paper, and...