Adaptive Production Planning by Information Sharing for Reverse Supply Chain

This paper describes a production planning method for a reverse supply chain, in which a disassembly company takes reusable components from returned products and supplies the reusable components for a product manufacturer. Such a supply chain is faced with an issue that the timings and quantities of returned products and reusable components obtained from them are unknown. The authors propose a method to resolve the issue by sharing information among companies comprising the supply chain. The method first predicts the quantities of returned products and reusable components by using reliability models. Using the prediction result, each of the companies performs their production planning through the information sharing. The shared information is also used to adjust the reliability models and consequently to make production plans adequate. The flow of the components and products through the supply chain is simulated to show the effectiveness of the method.