Abstract
As today's business environment has become more and more competitive, forward as well as backward flows of products among members belonging to a supply chain have been increased. The backward flows of products, which are common in most industries, result from increasing amount of products that are returned, recalled, or need to be repaired. Effective management for the backward flows of products has become an important issue for businesses because of opportunities for simultaneously enhancing profitability and customer satisfaction from returned products. Since third party logistics service providers (3PLs) are playing an important role in reverse logistics operations, they should perform two simultaneous logistics operations for a number of different clients who want to improve their logistics operations for both forward and reverse flows. In this case, distribution networks have been independently designed with respect to either forward or backward flows so far. This paper proposes a mixed integer programming model for the design of network integrating both forward and reverse logistics. Since the network design problem belongs to a class of NP-hard problems, we present an efficient heuristic algorithm based on genetic algorithm (GA), of which the performance is compared to the lower bound by Lagrangian relaxation. Finally, the validity of proposed algorithm is tested using numerical examples.
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