Decision making in reverse logistics: Systematic literature review, case studies, and research perspectives

Reverse logistics is gaining attention in many organizations due to increasing environmental unease and consumer awareness, legislation burden and directives proliferation, green competitiveness and corporate social responsibility. As a result, companies are under increasing pressure not only to provide environmentally friendly products, but also to take back the faulty or end-of-life products in such a way that they are appropriately reused, reprocessed or disposed of. For the e-retailers, the importance is even higher because of the huge number of returns to be managed. Here, after presenting fundamental concepts and listing recent case studies in reverse logistics, we extensively discuss quantitative approaches to problems defined within this context. Deterministic and uncertain environments are considered. Our focus is on decision making under uncertainty which is becoming increasingly popular for reverse logistics problems. In conclusion, we highlight scientific research gaps and future investigation directions.