Abstract
With the increasing globalization, there are many
sources of uncertainty across the entire reverse logistics for
end-of-life product recovery. Information sharing is a key
ingredient in this respect because it helps to eradicate
potential uncertainties related to various corporate
behaviors, especially in remanufacture-to-order aspect.
However traditional reverse logistics does not fully address
itself to this issue. As a result, the progressive loss of product
information as it moves through its lifecycle becomes
inevitable which leads to a difficulty in implementing
remanufacture-to-order strategy. Motivated by this fact, this
study presents an ongoing design of novel reverse logistics
(i.e., e-reverse logistics). The Internet of things technology is
introduced into this framework for the purpose of keeping
product life cycle information integrity. Furthermore, the
cooperation and collaboration between actors involved in
proposed architecture are treated in multi-agent system
philosophy. The design characteristics and working
principles of e-reverse logistics are detailed in this paper and
it serves as a start point for further implementation.