Operational planning of forward and reverse logistic activities on multi-echelon supply-chain networks

• An integrated forward and reverse logistic problem is described, modeled and formulated.
• A decomposition method based on the column generation paradigm is developed to solve the problem.
• The method computes the flow of pallets with products and with recovered goods along a multi-echelon network.
• Solutions to variants of a real-world case study are presented.

Distribution activities arising from supply-chains of chemical and food industries involve the shipping of products directly and/or via distribution-centers. Also, due to growing ecology concerns, the recycling of recoverable-materials is becoming a common practice. In this paper, a distribution and recovering problem has been studied and modeled. The solution to the problem-model computes the forward and backward flows on a supply-chain network of a company that take into account ‘green logistics’ considerations. In this problem, vehicles departing from plants/distribution-centers perform delivery of products and pick-up of recyclables at the lowest network-level. At a higher level, larger vehicles re-supply distribution-centers with products and bring back to plants recyclable goods. The operation must coordinate the vehicles-tours to assure efficient forward and backwards flows. The paper presents a column-generation based decomposition-approach for finding near-optimal solutions to the problem. We also present computational results on test problems derived from a real case-study.