Generic production planning model for remanufacturing systems

Abstract

Remanufacturing, one of the most advanced product recovery options, processes used or end-of-life products with disassembly, reprocessing, and reassembly operations in such a way that their qualities are as good as new. This paper focuses on production planning in remanufacturing systems over a given planning horizon with discrete time periods. The main decisions are: (a) the number of used or end-of-life products to be disassembled and disposed; (b) the number of parts or components to be reprocessed, disposed, and newly purchased; and (c) the number of products to be reassembled. The objective is to maximize the total profit, i.e. the difference between the sales revenue and the relevant costs. In particular, set-up costs and times are explicitly considered since set-ups are significant in remanufacturing systems. As an extension of the existing literatures on production planning in remanufacturing systems, a generic mixed integer programming model is suggested that incorporates the detailed processes of the remanufacturing process. Then, owing to the complexity of the problem, two types of heuristics based on the linear programming technique are developed. To show the performances of the heuristics, computational experiments were done on some test instances, and the results are reported.