Environmental integrated closed loop logistics model: An artificial bee colony approach

Economical and Ecological consciousness have led to incorporate close loop logistics in modern manufacturing arena. The success of the close loop supply logistics mainly depends on good retrieval of the components still have significant amount of value added in the returned products. Thus, the proper management of the returned products is one of the key elements for enterprises. This paper illustrates the complexities involved in resolving a remanufacturing problem and formulates a mathematical model in which the return rate is a function of environmental factor. Since, such model belongs to a class on NP hard problems; an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm has been presented and tested over an illustrative example. The algorithm adequately explores the entire search space to achieve superior performance on the underlying problem. Further, the results obtained by ABC have been analyzed with particle swarm optimization where ABC was seen to significantly outperform the rest.