OR FORUM---The Evolution of Closed-Loop Supply Chain Research

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a comprehensive review of research efforts encompassing aspects of resources scarcity, waste generation and economic advantages; explore the CE landscape in the context of these three aspects especially when they are considered simultaneously; based on an idea of a comprehensive CE framework, propose an implementation strategy using top-down and bottom-up approach in a concurrent manner.

Abstract: While the terms Circular Economy and sustainability are increasingly gaining traction with academia, industry, and policymakers, the similarities and differences between both concepts remain ambiguous. The relationship between the concepts is not made explicit in literature, which is blurring their conceptual contours and constrains the efficacy of using the approaches in research and practice. This research addresses this gap and aims to provide conceptual clarity by distinguishing the terms and synthesising the different types of relationships between them. We conducted an extensive literature review, employing bibliometric analysis and snowballing techniques to investigate the state of the art in the field and synthesise the similarities, differences and relationships between both terms. We identified eight different relationship types in the literature and illustrated the most evident similarities and differences between both concepts.

TL;DR: This exhaustive literature review provides a concrete definition of Industry 4.0 and defines its six design principles such as interoperability, virtualization, local, real-time talent, service orientation and modularity.

TL;DR: The aim of this paper is to review recently published papers in reverse logistic and closed-loop supply chain in scientific journals and identify gaps in the literature to clarify and to suggest future research opportunities.

TL;DR: It is shown that under competition remanufacturing can become an effective marketing strategy, which allows the manufacturer to defend its market share via price discrimination.

TL;DR: This paper considers logistics network design in a reverse logistics context with a generic facility location model and uses this model to analyze the impact of product return flows on logistics networks.

TL;DR: It is found that if remanufacturing is very profitable, the original-equipment manufacturer may forgo some of the first-period margin by lowering the price and selling additional units to increase the number of cores available for remanufactured in future periods.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors develop models to support a manufacturer's recovery strategy in the face of a competitive threat on the remanufactured product market, and find that a firm may choose to remanufacture or preemptively collect its used products to deter entry even when the firm would not have chosen to do so under a pure monopoly environment.