A control point policy approach for the remanufacturing workshop

Abstract

The main environmental problems that most industrialized countries are facingnowadays are the increasing waste and the depletion of raw materials. To slowdown theincrease of waste, one effective method is the recovery of materials from used products at the end of their useful lives. Remanufacturing is one of the essential industrial processes torecover the products at the end of their useful lives. This process starts with disassembly ofthe returned product into primary parts. Then every part is renewed or substituted with anewer one and finally assembled in order to obtain a final good. Even if we produce with decreased costs in remanufacturing, cost efficiency is notassured due to the high variation of the reusability percentage of a returned product. Due tothe difficulty of forecasting the state of the returned goods, it becomes difficult to makedecisions about the control of the system. In our thesis, we propose a solution to obtain cost efficiency in a remanufacturingenvironment considering the impact of disposing off the disassembled parts. Weimplement a control mechanism on a sample remanufacturing job-shop represented by aqueuing network topology that aims to minimize the estimated total cost function of our system. We construct the remanufacturing system with unreliable machines andcapacitated buffers and we consider outsourcing and disposal of one specific part type. Webuild the mathematical model of our system, conduct a numerical analysis and comparewith a simulation the model. The resulting methodology provides necessary information to make appropriate decisions about the control of a remanufacturing environment to reachthe optimal cost levels.