The optimal determination of the collection period for returned products in the sustainable supply chain

摘要

With the increasing attention paid to corporate social responsibility, a growing number of firms have attempted to leverage their sustainability initiatives as their competitive strategic weapons. These initiatives include the firm's efforts to streamline a closed-loop supply chain involving returned products. Though considerable efforts have been made to develop an optimal reverse logistics network for retrieving the returned products in the existing literature, prior research often overlooked the environmental and economic ramifications of the length of retrieval time associated with the product return process. This paper is one of the first to develop a mathematical model that can determine the optimal collection period at an initial collection point before transshipping the returned products to a centralised return centre. To reflect the realistic complexity of the product return process, we analysed the cases of both discrete and continuous collection periods, while drawing necessary theorems and corollaries.