Life period based collection and location of collection centre in reverse supply chain management

Due to the recently changed environmental requirements that affect manufacturing operations and transportation systems; growing attention is given to the development of environment management strategies for supply chains. The reverse supply chain involves the movement of used products from the customer to the upstream supply chain for possible recycling and reuses. It has been found that reverse supply chain should be part of supply chain integrated as it can contribute to lowering overall costs and meeting environmental regulations. The paper aims at contributing the explicit formulation of quantity of returned products by the consumer and location of collection centre based on the product life cycle of consumer electronic products which is said to be having minimum obsolesce rate. The logic behind the formulation of the quantity of products collected from the consumers is based on capturing the willingness of the consumer to return the products. Selecting a facility location, in most of the real world applications, is a complex process involving multiple facilities, multiple sites, multiple criteria and multiple stages. The transportation cost can be reduced by effective location of collection centre. The second part of the paper aims to efficiently assist the decision makers in determining the “most appropriate” collecting centre location using multi-criteria decision making model.