Optimal pricing and remanufacturing decisions for a fuzzy dual-channel supply chain

ABSTRACT

This paper studies pricing and remanufacturing problems in a fuzzy dual-channel supply chain that includes a retailer and a manufacturer who produces a product (either an entirely new product directly from raw materials or from remanufacturing a returned unit or parts of it into a new product) and sells it to the end customer through a retailer or direct channel. The manufacturing cost, the remanufacturing cost and the customer demand are specified as fuzzy variables. By using game theory and fuzzy theory, the optimal decision on wholesale price, retail price, direct price and remanufacturing effort are examined respectively under the centralised and the decentralised decision models. Finally, numerical examples are solved in order to explain the effectiveness of the proposed models.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual-channel closed-loop supply chain
• centralised and decentralised networks
• remanufacturing effort
• pricing
• game theory
• fuzzy theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K. Karimabadi

K. Karimabadi received the M.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran in 2016. Karimabadi's research interests are in the field of supply chain management, Operations Research and optimisation techniques and their applications.

A. Arshadi-khamseh

A. Arshadi-Khamseh got the Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering in 2007 from Amirkabir University, Tehran, Iran. Alireza Arshadi Khamseh's interest areas are pricing using game theory, sustainable network design and supplier selection in supply chain management.

B. Naderi

B. Naderi currently works as a researcher at Ivey Business School in London, Ontario. Regarding Naderi's education, all the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees are Industrial Engineering/Management Sciences with the focus on data/business analytics and programming. Over the past eight years, Naderi has been involved in several industrial projects in the area of machine learning, statistical, and optimisation algorithms, programming languages such as Python, C++, PHP, database management, and data visualisation.