Strategic design of reverse production systems

Increasing world population and standards of living are leading to increase d resource use and disposal. To sustain ourselves at these levels of materi al comfort will require that our utilization of resources becomes radically more efficient. One strategy for achieving greater material efficiency is the recycling of products back into useful raw materials. Efficient recycli ng requires attention to the strategic design of reverse production systems . In this paper, we present the concepts and issues surrounding reverse pro duction system design and an initial formulation to address some of the que stions around its implementation. The formulation is as a mixed integer lin ear program and we utilize a robust optimization framework. This framework poses the objective as the minimization of the maximum deviation of the per formance of the network from the optimal performance under a number of diff erent scenarios. We illustrate the framework with the example of carpet rec ycling, which is currently being undertaken on a national scale in the US. The case study shows that the flexibility of the process technology to recy cle as large a fraction of the collected material as possible is a strong d river for overall economic effectiveness of the reverse production system. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.