Abstract
Nowadays, regulations and consumer awareness concerning the environment have caused product manufacturers to design and manage environmentally conscious supply chains. This paper provides a simulation-based approach to designing such an environmentally conscious supply chain involving reverse logistics (I.e., logistics of the collection and recovery of discarded products and materials.) This approach evaluates a supply chain from two viewpoints: the environmental load and the economical aspect (cost, benefit, and profitability) of every company's business included in the supply chain. To evaluate it, the approach models and simulates the material and money flows between and in the companies and/or factories, by using colored petri nets. The simulation reveals: whether each of the companies obtains a profit; how heavy the environmental load is; whether the capacity of each company or factory is enough; and how much capacity of a factory is required if the factory is planned to be built and its capacity has not been determined. As the validation example, we applied the approach to the location allocation problem of disassembly factories, in which we assumed that the other components of the supply chain have been determined. As a result, we found the optimal number, locations, capacities of disassembly factories.
