A review of mathematical inventory models for reverse logistics and the future of its modeling: An environmental perspective

Abstract

The responsible management of product return flows in production and inventory environments is a rapidly increasing requirement for companies. This can be attributed to economic, environmental and/or regulatory motivations. Mathematical modeling of such systems has assisted decision-making processes and provided a better understanding of the behavior of such production and inventory environments. Therefore, this paper reviews the literature on the modeling of reverse logistics inventory systems that are based on the economic order/production quantity (EOQ/EPQ) and the joint economic lot size (JELS) settings, so as to systematically analyze the mathematics involved in capturing the main characteristics of related processes. The literature is surveyed and classified according to the specific issues faced and modeling assumptions. Special attention is given to environmental issues. In addition, there are indications of the need for the mathematics of reverse logistics models to follow current trends in ‘greening’ inventory and supply-chain models. Finally, the modeling of waste disposal, greenhouse-gas emissions and energy consumption during production is considered as the most pressing priority for the future of reverse logistics models. An illustrative example for modeling reverse logistics inventory models with environmental implications is presented

Integrated decision-making in reverse logistics: an optimisation of interacting acquisition, grading and disposition processes

“…Beyond this, Bazan, Jaber, and Zanoni (2016) focus in a review article on inventory models for reverse logistics and provide a detailed analysis of literature considering economic order/production quantity and joint economic lot size (Bazan, Jaber, and Zanoni 2016). Decision variables to be optimised in the respective models can be related to the concerned processes with respect to acquisition, grading, and disposition.…”

The integrated production-inventory-routing problem in the context of reverse logistics: The case of collecting and remanufacturing of EOL products

“…Constraint (13)- (14) guarantee that the delivery and pickup demands at customer j are satisfied. Constraint (15) ensures that the quantity of remanufactured products at the actual period was held in the returns inventory in the previous period. This constraint guarantees the policy 'remanufacturing after collecting'.…”

“…Moreover, in the recent literature, there has been an increasing interest in the study of lot-sizing problems with remanufacturing due to their large applicability in reverse logistics. Two recent reviews on the modelling of lot-sizing and reverse logistics inventory systems are given by [14] and [15]. Mainly, the single-item dynamic lotsizing problem with remanufacturing (SDLSR) has attracted the attention of several authors during the last years.…”

Urban Distribution Mode Selection under Low Carbon Economy—A Case Study of Guangzhou City

“…In this paper, ε " 0.1. First of all, we introduce the deviation symbol δ ijp , and the definition is shown as Equation (4). According to the properties of the fuzzy complementary judgment matrix, it is easy to know: In this paper, only one pair of elements is adjusted at each time.…”