Development of Rfid-Based Reverse Logistics System

Reverse logistics receive higher attention from industries in recent years. The reasons are the concerns over energy saving, green legislation and the rise of electronic commerce. Additionally, some logistics companies realize that strategic collections of returned products lead to repetitive purchase and reduce risk from variable demands and costs (Rogers &Tibben-Lembke, 2001). With the increasing popularity of reverse logistics, firms operating optimal planning of inventory, warehouse and routes of returned products are more competitive than the others. Uncertain quantity and quality of returned products are the challenges faced by companies in reverse logistics networks. Therefore, it is important for firms to equip with efficiency of recycling in reverse logistics. RFID is implemented to identify the quantities of returned products such that effective and efficient routing could be planned.

RFID-based Reverse Logistics System (RLS) is the system consisted of computational, engineering and mathematic approaches whicg are designed to verify inventory level of returned products (Lee & Chan, 2009). The infrastructure of the RFID-based RLS comprises of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and RFID. Returned products are scanned via RFID reader. The information will be send to PDA or touch screen computer which will transfer the information to router that connects to dynamic logistics information updated unit. The updated unit consists of middleware that links to SQL database and GA by Ethernet. The middleware is used to filter and sort whether data should be sent to SQL database or GA. In the SQL database, data are analyzed, transformed and stored so that the logistics practitioners can make decisions based on the historical data. After the information is sent to GA, it will determine the best location of each collection point by optimizing the quantity of returned goods. By using RFID-based RLS, GA is able to determine the best collection location in less than 3 minutes. This reveals that the latest RFID technology and heuristic algorithm could become a future potential combination for widespread applicability in reverse logistics.