Optimization of Forward/Reverse Logistics Networks for Electronic Products

Rapid technology advances have shortened the lifecycle of electronic products, resulting in the increasing number of discarded products in recent years. Due to the growing environmental concerns, an effective reverse logistics infrastructure is required to support the product recovery activities. In this study, a forward/reverse logistics model is developed to minimize the total cost of supply chain network (SCN) and maximize the total customer demand that can be satisfied. One of the goals of the research is to investigate the opportunities of substituting raw materials with recycled waste/by-product material collected from the customers. Since the proposed forward/reverse logistics model is a mixed-integer linear programming model, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to efficiently solve the model for large problem instances is suggested.