A dynamic pricing approach for returned products in integrated forward/reverse logistics network design

During the last decade, the stringent pressures from environmental and social requirements have spurred an interest in designing a reverse logistics network. In this paper, we address the problem of designing and planning a multi-echelon, multi-period, multicommodity and capacitated integrated forward/reverse logistics network. Returned products are categorized with respect to their quality levels, and a different acquisition price is offered for each return type. Furthermore, the reservation incentive of customers, the expected price of customers for one unit of used product described by uniform distribution, is applied to model the customers’ return willingness. Due to the fact that the remaining worthwhile value in the used products is the corporation’s key motivation for buying them from customers, a dynamic pricing approach is developed to determine the acquisition price for these products and based on it determine the percentage of returned products collected from customer zones. The used products’ acquisition prices at each time period are determined based on the customers’ return willingness by each collection center. A novel mixed-integer linear programming is developed to consider dynamic pricing approach for used products, forward/reverse logistics network configuration and inventory decisions, concurrently. The presented model is solved by commercial solver CPLEX for some test problems. Computational results indicate that the effect of a dynamic pricing approach for used products versus a static pricing one, and the linearization of pricing concept for this model have the acceptable solution. In addition, sensitivity analysis is conducted to show the performance of the proposed model. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.