Operational planning of forward and reverse logistic activities on multi-echelon supply-chain networks

R. DONDO; CARLOS A. MENDEZ

COMPUTERS AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016 vol. 88 p. 170 - 184

0098-1354

tDistribution activities arising from supply-chains of chemical and food industries involve the shippingof products directly and/or via distribution-centers. Also, due to growing ecology concerns, the recyclingof recoverable-materials is becoming a common practice. In this paper, a distribution and recoveringproblem has been studied and modeled. The solution to the problem-model computes the forward andbackward flows on a supply-chain network of a company that take into account ?green logistics? con-siderations. In this problem, vehicles departing from plants/distribution-centers perform delivery ofproducts and pick-up of recyclables at the lowest network-level. At a higher level, larger vehicles re-supply distribution-centers with products and bring back to plants recyclable goods. The operation mustcoordinate the vehicles-tours to assure efficient forward and backwards flows. The paper presents acolumn-generation based decomposition-approach for finding near-optimal solutions to the problem.We also present computational results on test problems derived from a real case-study