Strategic safety stocks in reverse logistics supply chains

In the last few years growing interest has been dedicated to supply chain management. Modeling complexity is added to the supply chain coordination problem by accounting for reverse logistics activities. An increasing number of ecological constraints, together with economic incentives, allows product recovery to become an interesting field in supply chain management. Limitations, enormous waste and by-product disposal cost, the duty for manufacturers to take back used products from customers and the fact that returned products might have a positive economic value are some of the reasons. The objective of this paper is to combine the problem of safety stock planning in a general supply chain with the integration of external and internal product return and reuse.