Location based treatment activities for end of life products network design under uncertainty by a robust multi-objective memetic-based heuristic approach

• We integrate decisions about the locations of reverse logistics activities with network design.
• We consider demand uncertainty due to the inherit uncertainty in terms of quantity and quality of the return products.
• We consider another objective to minimize the variance of extra imposed costs as well as the average.
• We develop a memetic-based heuristic approach to solve the problem.

Rapid growth in world population and recourse limitations necessitate remanufacturing of products and their parts/modules. Managing these processes requires special activities such as inspection, disassembly, and sorting activities known as treatment activities. This paper proposes a capacitated multi-echelon, multi-product reverse logistic network design with fuzzy returned products in which both locations of the treatment activities and facilities are decision variables. As the obtained nonlinear mixed integer programming model is a combinatorial problem, a memetic-based heuristic approach is presented to solve the resulted model. To validate the proposed memetic-based heuristic method, the obtained results are compared with the results of the linear approximation of the model, which is obtained by a commercial optimization package. Moreover, due to inherent uncertainty in return products, demands of these products are considered as uncertain parameters and therefore a fuzzy approach is employed to tackle this matter. In order to deal with the uncertainty, a stochastic simulation approach is employed to defuzzify the demands, where extra costs due to opening new centers or extra transportation costs may be imposed to the system. These costs are considered as penalty in the objective function. To minimize the resulting penalties during simulation's iterations, the average of penalties is added to the objective function of the deterministic model considered as the primary objective function and variance of penalties are considered as the secondary objective function to make a robust solution. The resulted bi-objective model is solved through goal programming method to minimizing the objectives, simultaneously.