Should Reusable Items be Accumulated in Regional Depots?
(2010) ILS′2010 : International Conference on Information Systems, Logistics and Supply Chain — Location: Casablanca, Morocco (14.April.2010)
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- Abstract
- Reverse logistics is now recognized as an important matter in supply chain management. In this paper, we focus on the return flow of reusable items such as pallets, bottles or trestles. We examine an important strategic question that originally came from a glass producer: should depots be introduced in the return network? The optimization model we propose allows to evaluate the cost of this option, including transportation and holding. Furthermore, several insights are offered about the network design: how many and where depots should be positioned, to which clients and factories are they related, what should be the frequency of the shipments, how many items are needed in the network, etc. Thanks to realistic assumptions, a continuous model is formulated, which further has the advantage to decompose into a simple problem and a linear-like program. We then build on this to propose a simple iterative heuristic, which allows to solve large problems in a reasonable amount of time. Finally, we apply our method on a realistic illustrative example (10 factories and 500 clients) and provide experiments to analyze the impact of various parameters of the problem.
- Affiliations
Louvain School of Management Operations and Information FUCaM Sciences de gestion
Citations
Lange, J.-C., Tancrez, J.-S., Semal, P., Strack, G., & Evrard, K. (2010). Should Reusable Items be Accumulated in Regional Depots? ILS′2010 : International Conference on Information Systems, Logistics and Supply Chain, Casablanca, Morocco. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/86379