A Mathematical Model for the Sustainable Design of a Cellular Manufacturing System in the Tactical Planning of a Closed-Loop Supply Chain Featuring Alternative Routings and Outsourcing Option

Abstract

In this paper, a new mathematical model is presented for a cellular manufacturing system into tactical planning of a closed-loop supply chain to build a sustainable manufacturing enterprise. On the manufacturing side of the model, a comprehensive cellular manufacturing system is designed considering dynamic cell configuration, alternative process routings, lot splitting, sequence of operations, multiple units of identical machines, machine capacity, machine adjacency requirements, and cell size limits. On the closed-loop supply chain side of the model, different activities are considered including acquiring returned products, setting up the system for the implementation of disassembly operations, inventory holding of the returned products, remanufacturing the parts having high quality, and disposing of the returned products that cannot be economically recovered. The mathematical model in this paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first model reducing the total costs of the cellular manufacturing system while considering the alternative process routings and subcontracting of the part demands. A detailed economic analysis is done on the large-sized example problem of the mathematical model to investigate the impacts of adopting different production policies such as internal production, inventory holding, and subcontracting as well as different manufacturing attributes such as dynamic reconfiguration and alternative process routings. The mathematical model is also solved for different instances to investigate the effects of incorporating subcontracting, alternative process routings, and dynamic reconfigurations in the model. Sensitivity analyses are also conducted to investigate the effects of the recovery rate of returned products on the objective function value and the number of returned products to be acquired. The effect of taking alternative process routings into consideration on the objective function value is also investigated.