Optimal collection policies for returned products in the reverse supply chain

Moulik Kapadia, Emanuel Melachrinoudis and Nizar Zaarour

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2022, vol. 42, issue 2, 240-272

Abstract: The emergence of e-commerce and increasing customer service expectations have pushed a growing number of firms to adopt liberal return policies, this results however in skyrocketing return delivery costs. To reduce this impact of product returns on a firm's baseline, we develop and compare different collection models by leveraging economies of scale and optimising the collection period across multiple initial collection points (ICPs) in a three-echelon network before transshipping the returned products to a centralised return centre (CRC). Collection policies are developed for the case of multiple ICPs and a single type of product: 1) individual shipment policy; 2) combined shipment policy; 3) hybrid shipment policy. Mathematical models are developed for calculating the combined inventory and transportation costs for these policies, and an optimisation approach is designed to minimise the number of computations required to reach the optimal collection period. The results are then presented with an experimental dataset.

Keywords: product returns; reverse logistics; optimisation; multiple collection points; reverse supply chain; closed-loop supply chain; operations research. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=124155 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijlsma:v:42:y:2022:i:2:p:240-272

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().