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.