Abstract
Due to the rapid obsolescent nature of consumer
products, the remanufacture-to-stock strategy, in which
remanufacturers tend to collect certain amount of end-of-life
products, remanufacturing them as many as they can and keep
these remanufactured products in stock waiting for customers
come to buy, is not always an optimal solution. Under this
circumstance, remanufacture-to-order policy, as an effective
complement, provides a good trade-off for remanufacturers
between meeting consumers’ demand and, in the meantime,
keeping the inventory cost at a lower level. To remanufacture
the used items, the manufacturer must retrieve them from the
market where they are dispersed among consumers. This is
accomplished by means of a reverse logistics chain that is
comparable to the new product distribution system in reverse.
However, the current reverse logistics do not respond to
remanufacture-to-order at an efficient level. Therefore it is a
necessity to develop a novel infrastructure, which can deal with
these issues. This paper presents a framework called e-reverse
logistics that aims at filling this gap. The major features and
architecture of the proposed e-reverse logistics are detailed in
this work.