Closed-loop Supply Chain Network Design And Pricing Problems

In recent years,the research in closed-loop supply chain has received a lot more attention by reseachers and companies.There are three reasons for the increasing popularity of the research topics.Firstly,the more products that are produced to meet customers' need,the more wastes that are generated,some of these wastes are hard to biodegradation and contain toxic substances.Due to the improper recycling procedual,our environment is gradually deteriorating.Thus many countries had drawn up legislations stating that the original manufacturers are assumed to take the responsibility for products recovery and recycling,companies are required to make product recover plans and establish recover facilities.Secondly,Enterprises intend to establish recycling systems to collect and remanufacturing end of life products to save cost and increase profits.Lastly,there are a large number of recalled and obsolete products which emerge at the end of traditional supply chain,these products and materials represents the growing financial burden or business opportunities to the supply chain enterprises.This paper focuses on the following two aspects of closed-loop supply chains.Firstly,a mixed integer mathematical model for a closed-loop supply-chain network with multi-periods is proposed.The model can help determining the location of facilities and making the transportation plan,Cplex software is used to solve the problem and verify the validity of the model.Computational results are presented to show how the change of demand,collection rate and the combination of the two factors affect the model,the derived data can also be used to analyze profit or loss of establishing reverse logistics.The priority-based Genetic Algorithm(pb-GA)is often used for two-stage or three-stage transportation problem,but when devide closed-loop supply-chain network into interrelated subproblem,we can approach the optimal solution of the problem by solving the subproblem of muti-stage transportation and location problem.Cases are generated to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.Secondly,as the demand of products is affected by the price,and there is substitution between new products and remanufactured products,thus the two kinds of product can cannibalize each others' sales,different market demands lead to different outcome of optimal supply chain network design,this paper studies a joint problem of facilities location,transportation planning and pricing in the context of previous closed-loop supply chain network structure.A nonlinear programming model is proposed to solve the multi-periods pricing and closed-loop supply chain network design problem with capacitated facilities,then computational results are presented to verify the effectness of the model.At last,the influence of customers' psychology on the profitability of the supply chain enterprises is studied.