An Investigation on a Closed-Loop Supply Chain of Product Recycling Using a Multi-Agent and Priority Based Genetic Algorithm Approach

Product recycling issues have gained increasing attention in many industries in the last decade due to a variety of reasons driven by environmental, governmental and economic factors. Closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) models integrate the forward and reverse flow of products. Since the optimization of these CLSC models is known to be NP-Hard, competition on optimization quality in terms of solution quality and computational time becomes one of the main focuses in the literature in this area. A typical six-level closed-loop supply chain network is examined in this paper, which has great complexity due to the high level of echelons. The proposed solution uses a multi-agent and priority based approach which is embedded within a two-stage Genetic Algorithm (GA), decomposing the problem into (i) product flow, (ii) demand allocation and (iii) pricing bidding process. To test and demonstrate the optimization quality of the proposed algorithm, numerical experiments have been carried out based on the well-known benchmarking network. The results prove the reliability and efficiency of the proposed approach compared to LINGO and the benchmarking algorithm discussed in the literature.