Strategic planning of a reverse supply chain network

Strategic planning of a supply chain network is one of the most challenging elements of managing reverse logistics. To effectively satisfy drivers such as profitability, environmental regulations and asset recovery, only the most economical used-products must be re-processed in only the recovery facilities that have the potential to efficiently re-process them. Due to uncertainties in supply, quality and re-processing times of used-products, the cost–benefit function used in the literature to select the most economical product to re-process from a set of used-products, is not appropriate for direct adoption. Moreover, due to the same uncertainties, any traditional forward supply chain approach to identify potential manufacturing facilities cannot be employed to identify potential recovery facilities. This paper proposes a three-phase mathematical programming approach, taking the above uncertainties into account, for strategic planning of a reverse supply chain network. Application of the approach is detailed through illustrative examples.reverse logistics; reverse supply chain; strategic planning; supply chain networks; decision support systems; DSS; mathematical programming; analytic hierarchy process; discrete location model; product reuse; product recovery; end-of-life products