The collection of used products is the driving force of remanufacturing systems and enterprises can gain significant economic, technical and social benefits from recycling. All products are disassembled up to some level in remanufacturing systems. The best way to disassemble returned products is valid by a well-balanced disassembly line. In this paper, a mixed integer programming (MIP) model is proposed for a mixed model disassembly line balancing (MMDLB) problem with multiple conflicting objectives: (1) minimising the cycle time, (2) minimising the number of disassembly workstations and (3) providing balanced workload per workstation. In most real world MMDLB problems, the targeted goals of decision makers are frequently imprecise or fuzzy because some information may be incomplete and/or unavailable over the planning horizon. This study is the first in the literature to offer the binary fuzzy goal programming (BFGP) and the fuzzy multi-objective programming (FMOP) approaches for the MMDLB problem in order to take into account the vague aspirations of decision makers. An illustrative example based on two industrial products is presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed models and to compare the performances of the BFGP and the FMOP approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world and is currently one of the most leading causes of death and heath disaster in the world. Turkey, like most of the countries, has been negatively affected by COVID-19. The aim of this study is to design a predictive model based on artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict the future number of daily cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 in a generalized way to fit different countries’ spreads. In this study, we used a dataset between 11 March 2020 and 23 January 2021 for different countries. This study provides an ANN model to assist the government to take preventive action for hospitals and medical facilities. The results show that there is an 86% overall accuracy in predicting the mortality rate and 87% in predicting the number of cases.

Closed-Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) management has attained appreciable attention over the last few years. CLSC management allows companies to manage their recovery and recycling activities of end products. Due to the latest developments in the world, producers are responsible for the collection, refurbishing, repairing and disassembly of end products at the end of their lives. This paper develops a mixed-integer CLSC model that is inspired by the automotive industry. In this model, we consider three Decision Makers (DM): Plant, Dismantler Center and Customer. Each DM has individual objectives and is responsible for only its own objective function under same constraints. In order to tackle the trade-offs among the objectives, we used four different Interac-tive Fuzzy Programming (IFP) approaches. The applications of the model and solution techniques are investigated in conjectural data. The paper ends with a conclusion and a call for future studies.

Many companies embrace Industry 4.0 technologies to enable operational sustainability against increasing climate change effects, decreasing natural resources, and raising consumer awareness of environmental issues. Even though readiness and maturity assessment of smartness and sustainability concepts are nested, no study simultaneously focuses on these concepts. As pioneering research, we propose a novel model titled “Smart and Sustainable Supply chain Readiness and Maturity model (S3RM)” and validate it by conducting a case study in the automotive industry. We design our model upon the triple-bottom-line (TBL) approach consisting of smartness and sustainability dime5nsions. Our study introduces the TBL of smartness covering availability, integrity, and adaptability sub-dimension. TBL of sustainability includes social, environmental, and economic sub-dimensions. The proposed model calculates the Smart and Sustainable Readiness and Maturity Index by averaging sustainability scores’ summation and smartness scores’ multiplication. Each sub-dimension consists of items measured by a readiness and maturity scale. The findings suggest how smartness and sustainability items create strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the supply chain operations. Our model provides managerial implications in assessing the readiness and maturity of Industry 4.0 tools and sustainability indicators. This study offers a road map to managers on smart and sustainable supply chains’ defined target areas.

Today, the requirement of reverse supply chain (RSC) optimization takes more attention due to environmental and competitive factors. However, increasing attention and existing uncertainty in RSC also increases the difficulties for decisions of production/distribution planning. Therefore, considering strategic and tactical decisions together under fuzziness is being essential. This paper presents a fuzzy programming approach to the integration of RSC optimization (strategic level) and disassembly line balancing (DLB) (tactical level) problems. The aim of this study is to apply fuzzy modeling to optimize a RSC that involves customers, collection/disassembly centers and plants while balancing the disassembly lines in disassembly centers, simultaneously. Two types of fuzzy mathematical programming models with different aggregation operators are used. Finally, accuracy and applicability of the model is illustrated and a comparison of fuzzy approaches is done via a hypothetical example.