Quality, Reliability, Maintenance Issues in Closed-Loop Supply Chains: A Review

The collection and recovery of end-of-life products has been a very successful research area especially around the design of reverse logistics and remanufacturing processes. Unfortunately, there is very little work on the issues of quality, reliability, maintenance & warranty for these recovered products and the remanufacturing activities that will take them to their subsequent lifecycles. This paper reviews recent and relevant literature on quality, reliability, maintenance and warranty problems in closed-loop supply chains with a focus on the remanufactured or second-hand products. A variety of mathematical tools and techniques used in the literature are mapped to the main issues considered. The findings are summarized, and the main research issues and opportunities are highlighted.