Ready-Capacity Forecasting for Reusable Products under Demand-Driven Recirculation

Working Paper Overview

This working paper studies capacity forecasting in reusable-product systems, where products are repeatedly consumed, returned, processed, and made available again. Examples include rental services, reusable packaging, sharing platforms, and repairable asset systems.

Unlike traditional inventory settings, future demand in reusable-product systems has a dual role: it reduces available capacity when usage begins, but may also generate future available capacity after the product completes its usage and readiness process. This creates a distinct forecasting problem in which the target is not demand alone, but the future calendar of ready capacity.

Research Question

How can firms forecast future ready capacity in reusable-product systems when demand, usage duration, and readiness timing jointly determine future availability?

Research Approach

The paper develops a forecasting framework for reusable-product operations with demand-driven recirculation. The framework links expected future demand, existing commitments, usage timing, and uncertain readiness delays to forecast future ready capacity.

Numerical Study

The paper uses simulation-based experiments to evaluate the proposed forecasting perspective. The numerical analysis compares forecast accuracy across different demand-load and readiness-delay settings and examines whether improved ready-capacity forecasts can support better operational decisions.

The evaluation focuses on both statistical performance and operational outcomes, including forecast accuracy, service decisions, capacity utilization, and system-level performance.

Research Contributions

This working paper contributes to the Operations Management literature by introducing a ready-capacity forecasting perspective for reusable-product systems. It shows that explicitly accounting for demand-driven recirculation can improve the understanding of future capacity availability and support better decision-making in circular and reusable-resource operations.

The study is relevant to rental platforms, reusable packaging networks, sharing-economy services, repairable asset systems, and other operations where capacity is repeatedly consumed and restored.