Abstract: In the increasingly fierce competition environment of civil aviation, the delicacy management of cost control is very important for airlines. The in-flight reusable items are provided for passengers and can use again after cleaning. The inventory of these items is imbalanced in some base locations because of the variation of in-flight meals and the different number of passengers in round-trip flights.So under the demand and return of in-flight reusable items in each base is given, an inventory model of in-flight reusable items is established in a multi-base inventory system and an order and transportation scheme is made, to minimize the total inventory cost (including ordering cost, holding cost, transshipment costand recovery cost) in an ordering cycle. Based on the analysis of the optimal solution of the model, it can be found the optimal total order quantity of the inventory system at the beginning of the period under certain conditions,and the inventory model can also be transformed into a network flow model, then a polynomial algorithm is given to solve thenetwork flow model and to find the optimal transshipment quantity of the system, and the optimality of the algorithm is proved; According to the scope of the feasible solution of the total order quantity, a heuristic algorithm is also given to solve the inventory model. The actual data of in-flight reusable items of a large airline are taken. The validity of themodel and algorithm is tested and verified by the results. And finally, the inventory problem of in-flight reusable items still needs further research, such as considering stochastic demand and the multi-period.

Key words: in-flight reusable items, dynamic transshipment, multi-location inventory management, network flow algorithm