Circular logistics and operations: transportation across a product’s lifecycle

Demir, Emrah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4726-2556, Goltsos, Thanos E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5245-9775 and White, Sean 2026. Circular logistics and operations: transportation across a product’s lifecycle. Jarboui, Bassem, Toumi, Said and Siarry, Patrick, eds. Circular Economy Supply Chains: Optimizing via Data Science, Computational Intelligence Methods and Applications, Singapore: Springer, pp. 187-206. (10.1007/978-981-96-7905-8_9)

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Abstract

The transition to the circular economy is underway but needs to overcome decades of linear thinking underpinning operations optimization and practices. The main difference between linear and circular operations is the role of consumers, from just recipients of finished goods to also being suppliers of cores (used products), which repair centers, remanufacturers, and other CE stakeholders can use as inputs to their operations. This transformation or change of roles underpins a huge increase of uncertainty, as supply is no longer limited in a mostly business-to-business-to-customer context, but rather customer-to-business-to-customer context, and has important ramifications on all operations, including transportation. With the goal being to eliminate materials reaching landfill, it is reasonable to expect that any forward (delivery) operation needs to be mirrored by a reverse (collection) operation, to close the loop and support circular logistics. This change is not trivial nor straightforward, as it is also not properly understood. To address this complex but crucial problem, this chapter proposes numerical analysis for designing a data-driven, operation-level decision-making support system that can dynamically allocate limited resources (e.g., transport capacity) to the right operations. We apply Monte Carlo simulation to consider pre-inspection, consolidation, and a product’s lifecycle for the chosen real-life case study. We employ forecasting to determine quality-based allocation across CE stakeholders (repair, remanufacturing, recycling) and consider various factors on a synthesized dataset, empirically grounded on data and discussions from and with experienced managers in the area. We find that pre-inspection and consolidation at the retailer is beneficial and that the benefits depend on the warranty duration relative to customer behavior (demand and return rates).

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Publisher:	Springer
ISBN:	9789819679041
Last Modified:	09 Jan 2026 15:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/183718

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