Dr. Alkhayyal earned his PhD degree in Industrial Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, USA on May 2017, I am applying for the Doctoral Dissertation Competition.
Multi-Criteria Decision Making Optimization for Reverse Supply Chains
Bandar A. Alkhayyal
Department of Engineering Management
College of Engineering
Prince Sultan University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
Modern supply chains are typically linear, transforming virgin raw materials into products for end consumers, who then discard them after use to landfills or incinerators. Nowadays, there are major efforts underway to create a circular economy to reduce non-renewable resource use and waste. One important aspect of these efforts is the development of Reverse Supply Chain (RSC) systems to enable a reverse flow of used products from consumers back to manufacturers, where they can be refurbished or remanufactured, to both economic and environmental benefit. This dissertation develops novel multi-objective optimization models to inform RSC system design at multiple levels: (1) strategic planning of facility location and transportation logistics; (2) tactical planning of optimal pricing; and (3) policy planning to account for potential valuation of RSC emissions. First, physical linear programming was applied to evaluate RSC facility placement by determining the quantities of end-of-life products for transport from candidate collection centers to remanufacturing facilities while satisfying cost and capacity criteria. Second, disassembly and remanufacturing processes have received little attention in industrial engineering and process cost modeling literature. The increasing scale of remanufacturing operations, worth nearly $50 billion annually in the United States alone, have made RSC pricing an important subject of research. A non-linear physical programming model for optimization of a pricing policy for remanufactured products that maximizes total profit and minimizes product recovery costs, was examined and solved. Finally, a deterministic equilibrium model was used to determine the effects of internalizing a cost of RSC greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into optimization models. Changes in optimal facility use, transportation logistics, and pricing/profit margins were all investigated against a variable cost of carbon, using case study system created based on actual data from sites in the Boston area. As carbon costs increase, the optimal RSC system undergoes several distinct shifts in topology as it seeks new cost-minimal configurations. A comprehensive study for quantitative evaluation and performance of the model has been done using Orthogonal Arrays. Results were compared to top-down estimates from economic input-output life cycle assessment (EIO-LCA) models, to contrast remanufacturing GHG emission quantities with those from original equipment manufacturing operations. Introducing a carbon cost of $40/t CO2e increases modeled remanufacturing costs by 2.7%, but also increases original equipment costs by 2.3%. The assembled work advances the theoretical modeling of optimal RSC systems and presents a rare case study of remanufactured appliances.
Keywords
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, low carbon logistics, reverse supply chain, sustainably supply chain, supply chain engineering
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for their financial support.
Biography
Dr. Bandar A. Alkhayyal is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Engineering Management in the College of Engineering at Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Dr. Alkhayyal received his B.S. degree in Computer Science with minor in Industrial Engineering from the Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, in June 2010. In December 2011, he received his M.S. degree in Engineering Management specialized in Project Management from the same school in Michigan, and in May 2013 he received his M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA, and then he earned his PhD degree in Industrial Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, USA on May 2017. Dr. Alkhayyal has certifications in Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Lean Enterprise Systems, and Lean Concepts and Applications. His research interests are in the areas of environmentally conscious manufacturing, product recovery, reverse logistics, closed-loop supply chains (CLSC), sustainable operations and sustainability, modeling with applications in CLSC and multiple lifecycle products, environmental engineering and sustainability, life cycle assessment, and energy efficiency and emissions modeling. He has co-authored several technical papers published in journals and presented at various national and international conferences.