Reverse Logistics and Inventory Management as Critical Issues for Supply Chain Sustainability

The authors deal with the problem of sustainability within supply chains considering as critical aspects, both in terms of preservation of limited available resources and ensuring higher profitability, the inventory management in the case of reverse flow of products (reverse logistics). The most important deterministic and stochastic inventory models in the reverse logistics field are briefly presented. A supply chain conceptual model with products return (double options remanufacturing and disposal) including twodifferent inventory control policies is considered. The inventory control policies sustainability in terms of total cost (including inventory costs, remanufacturing costs and disposal costs) is finally achieved by adapting and using the GreenLogistics simulator (Bruzzone et al. 2009).