Abdeelghani A Elimam
The American University in Cairo, Egypt
Title: On optimizing reverse supply chains
Biography
Biography: Abdeelghani A Elimam
Abstract
Environmental concerns as well as the continued decline in raw material reserves have intensified the need for Reverse Supply Chains (RSC). In addition RSC could lead to higher profitability by reducing shipping, storage and disposal costs. A RSC Supply chain for product recycling consists of a sequence of activities to collect used products and reprocess them through sorting, disassembly, recovering the valuable recycled material and or disposal. Typically, the top tier of the supply chain would include spent products that are considered for the reverse operations. These products are usually classified depending on their status whether refurbished and reused or disassembled into parts or directly to basic material. The bottom tier would include all parts or basic material recovered as well as all items to be disposed of. The intermediate tiers would include sorter, disassemblers or material recovery plants. The activities in these RSC tiers are modeled into a project network. The relationships among these project activities are then formulated into a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model. The model takes into account the shipping, processing and inventory holding costs for all the activities into the network. In addition, the formulation would allow for representing the value of the reclaimed or recycled parts and material. Other criteria including minimizing waste or maximizing a selected type of basic material is also explored. Computational results are presented along with an application of the developed MIP to several real world problems.