The impact of product lifecycle on capacity planning of closed-loop supply chains with remanufacturing

Product recovery operations in reverse supply chains face rapidly changing demand due to the increasing number of product offerings with reduced lifecycles. Therefore, capacity planning becomes a strategic issue of major importance for the profitability of closed-loop supply chains. This work studies a closed-loop supply chain with remanufacturing and presents dynamic capacity planning policies developed through the methodology of System Dynamics. The key issue of the paper is how the lifecycles and return patterns of various products affect the optimal policies regarding expansion and contraction of collection and remanufacturing capacities. The model can be used to identify effective policies, to conduct various ‘what-if’ analyses, and to answer questions about the long-term profitability of reverse supply chains with remanufacturing. The results of numerical examples with quite different lifecycle and return patterns show how the optimal collection expansion/contraction and remanufacturing contraction policies depend on the lifecycle type and the average usage time of the product, while the remanufacturing capacity expansion policy is not significantly affected by these factors. The results also show that the collection and remanufacturing capacity policies are insensitive to the total product demand. The insensitivity of the optimal policies to total demand is a particularly appealing feature of the proposed model, given the difficulty in obtaining accurate demand forecasts.