Exploring the opportunities in establishing a closed-loop supply chain under uncertainty

International audienceReverse supply chains (RSC) may provide the benefits of reducing pollution, creating new jobs, and generating income from the recyclable materials. At the same time, their implementation comes with higher risks and less predictable outcomes. The model presented in this paper aims to help managers to better evaluate risks and opportunities while deciding on the design of a RSC in order to manage the reverse flow of end-of-life (EOL) products in an existing supply chain. The goal is to set up the disassembly and recovery facilities and organize the flows between them while seeking to maximize total network profit. We propose a two-stage mixed-integer programming model with multiple periods where the budget available for decisions at each period depends on the outcomes of previous periods. We consider that the demand for EOL products, the quantity of products returned as well as the time required to reprocess these products are uncertain. To incorporate this uncertainty into the decision making process, a discrete set of scenarios is defined. In order to take into account the decision maker's behavior in the areas of risks and opportunities, we propose to use $R_*$ criterion to select the final solution. To demonstrate the significance and applicability of the developed model and the relevance of $R_*$ criterion, never used before for design problems in logistics, we conduct numerical investigations on an adapted case study from the literature and do a comparison with classic well-known criteria