Reverse logistics network design using simulated annealing

Abstract

Reverse logistics is becoming more important in overall industry area because of the environmental and business factors. Planning and implementing a suitable reverse logistics network could bring more profit, customer satisfaction, and a nice social picture for companies. But, most of logistics networks are not equipped to handle the return products in reverse channels. This paper proposes a mixed integer linear programming model to minimize the transportation and fixed opening costs in a multistage reverse logistics network. Since such network design problems belong to the class of NP-hard problems, we apply a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm with special neighborhood search mechanisms to find the near optimal solution. We also compare the associated numerical results through exact solutions in a set of problems to present the high-quality performance of the applied SA algorithm. © 2009 Springer-Verlag London Limited.