ABSTRACT
As market competition increases, it is necessary for a supply chain decision-maker to deeply study the company position in the market to ensure its sustainability by reaching its economical objective, taking responsibility toward the environment, and maximizing its customer satisfaction. The transition from traditional supply chain to closed-loop supply chain, going through different assumptions, has resulted in a significant improvement for many companies. However, aiming to achieve multiple objectives — in addition to robustness and flexibility — is still a concern for a closed-loop supply chain network. This paper addresses a robust mathematical model with multi-objectives for a closed-loop supply chain network design. Our proposed model does not only consider uncertainties; it also considers flexibility by allowing product substitution. The importance of this concept arises from the differences between a new and a remanufactured product, which has not been discussed in the literature of network design of closed-loop supply chain. Thus, we ensure customer satisfaction and avoid backorder, which might be not cost-effective and may result in a long lead time to satisfy the customer order. We present an illustrative numerical example from the National Industrial Clusters Development Program in Saudi Arabia in starting a tire manufacturing factory.
