Remanufacturing control in multistage systems with stochastic recovery rates

摘要

Remanufacturing operations involved with highly uncertain recovery rate of used products, subassemblies and parts that complicate the planning and control of the process. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive procedure that determines the optimal input quantities at each stage of the remanufacturing operations in which recovery rates at each stage of the process are stochastic. We model the remanufacturing system as an open queueing network and use the decomposition principle and expansion methodology to analyze it. Each station in the system is subject to breakdown and has a finite buffer capacity. Repair times, breakdown times and service times follow exponential distributions. Optimization is done on the system抯 expected total cost using a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm. A numerical example is presented to show the applicability of the model.