Study Of Location Problem On Reverse Logistics Network

Growing environment concern has called much attention to industry recovery of used products and materials. Driven by economic profitability, customer expectations and legislative regulation, manufactures are held responsible to an increasing extent for the entire lifecycle of their products. In the last decade, several recovery networks have been set up. While the design of product recovery networks is one of the challenging and actual reverse logistics problems. A number of papers have been published recently on the issue of reverse logistics network. However, few studies have addressed the problem of determining the number and location of centralized return centers where returned products from retailers or end-customers were inspected, repaired, and refurbished for re-distribution. And few studies have taken the uncertainties into account, which is an important characteristic of reverse logistics. To fill the void in such a line of research, this paper proposes three reverse logistics problems formulated as nonlinear mixed integer programming models and genetic algorithm approaches that can solve these problems.The first model proposed for a single product, single period problem consider location of centralized return centers and distribution centers with combined routing. The model objective is to minimize the total cost including maintenance costs of distribution centers and centralized return centers, transportation costs, opportunity cost and disposal costs for surplus products. In the extended form, a multi-object location allocation model is...