Rental Resource Management Model with Capacity Expansion and Return

We consider a rental company that dynamically manages Its capacity level through capacity addition and return While serving customer with its own capacity, the company expands its capacity by renting items from an outside source so that it can avoid lost opportunities of rental which occur when stock is not sufficient. If stock becomes sufficiently large enough to cope with demands, the company returns expanded capacity to the outside source. Formulating the model into a Markov decision problem, we identify an optimal capacity management Policy which states when the company should expand its capacity and when it should return expanded capacity after capacity addition. Since it is intractable to analytically find the optimal capacity management policy and the optimal size of capacity expansion, we present a numerical procedure that finds these optimal values based on the value iteration method. Numerical analysis is implemented and we observe monotonic properties of the optimal performance measures by system parameters, which are meaningful in developing effective heuristic policies.

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