It is urgently-needed to construct a green supply chain (GSC) from collection of used products through recycling of them to sales of products using the recycled parts. Besides, it is necessary to consider the uncertainty in product demand as a risk in a GSC. This study proposes the optimal operations for a GSC with a retailer and a manufacturer. A retailer pays an incentive for collection of used products from customers and sells a single type of products in a market. A manufacturer produces the products ordered by the retailer, using recyclable parts with acceptable quality and compensates the collection cost of used products as to the recycled parts. This paper discusses the following risk attitudes: risk-neutral attitude, risk-averse attitude, and risk-prone attitude. Using mean-variance analysis, the optimal decisions for product order quantity, collection incentive, and lower limit of quality level, in the decentralized GSC (DGSC) and the integrated GSC (IGSC) are made. DGSC optimizes the utility function of each member. IGSC does that of the whole system. The analysis numerically investigates how (i) risk attitude and (ii) quality of recyclable parts affect the optimal operations. Supply chain coordination between GSC members to shift IGSC from DGSC is discussed.
This paper discusses a reverse supply chain (RSC) which consists of the process flows from procurement of used products collected from a market, through remanufacturing products from the used products, to sales of the products in a market. In general, it is conceivable for the RSC to face the uncertainty in quality of used products collected from a market. Inspection is one of efficient methods to deal with the problem regarding quality of used products. However, there is a trade-off between inspection cost and inspection accuracy. This paper focuses on the following five types of inspection: (1) 100% inspection, (2) sampling inspection, (3) sampling inspection with screening of rejected lots, (4) sampling inspection with screening of acceptable lots, and (5) no inspection, and determines the optimal operation consisting of the optimal number of procured used products and the optimal inspection policy. Numerical analysis clarifies not only how changes of conditions of the RSC affect the manufacturer's optimal operation but also features of each inspection type. In addition, from the results of numerical analysis, this paper shows the usability to add the proposed inspection in this paper, the sampling inspection with screening of acceptable lots, to choices of inspection type.
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