Network Design for Reverse and Closed-Loop Supply Chains: An Annotated Bibliography of Models and Solution Approaches

Historically, both the theory and practice of supply chain management have placed an emphasis on manufacturing and distribution operations, i.e., the forward channel, which consists of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers. Recently, increased attention to product recovery practices has extended the scope of traditional supply chain management by drawing attention to collection, demanufacturing, and remanufacturing operations, i.e., the reverse channel, which consists of final-users, collectors, demanufacturers, and remanufacturers. To optimize the performance of the extended supply chain, there is a need to establish an effective and efficient infrastructure via optimal network design. As a result, network design for product recovery has attracted the attention of a growing number of researchers in the past decade. In an attempt to draw more academic attention to this area, this annotated bibliography provides a detailed account of the published literature. The article is organized into two main sections that focus on (i) reverse supply chain network design, which is concerned with establishing an infrastructure to manage the reverse channel only and (ii) closed-loop supply chain network design, which is concerned with establishing an infrastructure to manage both forward and reverse channels in a coordinated manner. Specifically, we describe the operational characteristics of the underlying supply chain system considered in each paper, highlight the features of the network design model proposed therein, and discuss the proposed solution approach along with a brief description of significant computational work, if available. In conclusion, a critical review of the published literature is given and potential areas for future research are identified. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 53(3), 231-248 2009