Reverse logistics: research issues and literature review

Among various environmental issues, those for worn-out products are increasingly important due to rapid development and improvement of products, shortages of dumping sites and waste–incineration facilities, and legislation pressures and customer recognitions to protect the environment. Under such circumstances, collection and product recovery activities give rise to additional material flows from customers back to collectors and reprocessors. Reverse logistics, the opposite direction of the conventional forward logistics, is concerned with the management of this material flow. In this paper, we consider the emerging concept of reverse logistics. First, the concept of sustainable development is explained to explain the philosophical background of various environmental issues. Second, we explain the basics of reverse logistics, which includes the overall structure and the classification of network types. Finally, we review the previous research articles, especially in the aspect of industrial engineering, after classifying the decision problems into: (a) product recovery strategy; (b) network design and operation; (c) inventory management; (d) disassembly problems; and (e) remanufacturing problems.