Abstract
Due to rising awareness of environmental protection and stringent regulations, firms are held responsible for collecting and recycling the goods they manufactured. Hence, the closed-loop supply chain, which not only deals with goods delivery from manufacturers to consumers but also recycling from consumers to manufacturers, arouses much research interest. Considering the combination of centralized/decentralized evaluation point design and focus/general facility, we construct four closed-loop supply chain structures. They are Centralized-Focus (CF), Centralized-General (CG), Decentralized-Focus (DF), and Decentralized-General (DG). In this research we take into account the time value, use queueing theory to evaluate average flow times of facilities in the structure, and develop profit function for each structure based on the average flow times. Furthermore, we study how product characteristics such as return rate, percentage of new returns, price at the primal market and secondary market, production cost and remanufacturing cost, and time discount rate impacts the choice of the closed-loop supply chain structures. For example, we find that if return rate is increased, manufacturer will tend to adopt DG structure. And if remanufacturing cost decay rate is less, manufacturer will tend to adopt CF structure.