Managing Reverse Logistics Activities in Cloud Manufacturing: An Agent-Based Architecture

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is a new service-oriented manufacturing paradigm that enables distributed collaboration between manufacturers. As logistics between geographically dispersed manufacturers are indispensable in CMfg environment and taking charge of the whole life cycle of products becomes more important for manufacturers, we have taken into account reverse logistics services in CMfg. Unlike the most of the research in the field, alongside fulfilling special needs of CMfg system from reverse logistics flow, this study considers transportation problem of returned products too. For this purpose, four cloud services are proposed related to product returning request by customers and manufacturers and also buying second-hand products and components by them. In addition, an agent-based architecture for considering reverse flows is suggested which includes eight agents: green value determiner, collection proposal, buy back price determiner, return rate forecaster, recycle cost determiner, sorting and redistribution, transportation planning and transportation resource allocation. Through cooperation and coordination of these agents, decision making efficiency on forward and reverse logistics services can be further improved and, thus, more environmental and economic benefits for a CMfg system can be achieved. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed agent- based architecture three scenarios of resource allocation are proposed for conducting a simulation on transportation data of a cloud- like system. The expected output of comparing scenarios is then discussed.

Managing Reverse Logistics Activities in Cloud Manufacturing: An Agent-Based Architecture Keywords:

Cloud Manufacturing , Reverse Logistics , Transportation , Service-oriented Environment , Agent-based Architecture