Reverse logistics: simultaneous design of delivery routes and returns strategies [An article from: Computers and Operations Research]

This digital document is a journal article from Computers and Operations Research, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
A reverse logistics problem, motivated by blood distribution of the American Red Cross, is examined where containers in which products are delivered from a central processing point to customers (stops) in one period are available for return to the central point in the following period. Any container not picked up in the period following its delivery incurs a penalty cost resulting primarily from operating costs and customer dissatisfaction. The result is a dynamic logistics planning problem where in each delivery period the vehicle dispatcher needs to design a multi-stop vehicle route while determining the container quantities to be picked up at each stop. This research is unique in that route design and pickup strategies are developed simultaneously, where stop volumes are known only probabilistically over a planning horizon. A heuristic procedure is developed for treating the route design-pickup strategy planning problem.