Production planning for remanufactured products

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for production planning within facilities involved in the remanufacture of products. Remanufacturing refers to the process of accepting inoperable units, salvaging good and repairable components from those units, and then re-assembling good units to be re-issued into service. These types of facilities are common, yet many suffer from the unpredictability of good and repairable component yields, as well as processing time variation. These problems combine to make it extremely difficult to predict whether overall production output will be sufficient to meet demand. Low yields of key components can lead to shortages which require the facility to purchase new components for legacy systems, often with long lead times, thus causing overall delays. The approach developed here is a probabilistic form of standard material requirements planning (MRP), which considers variable yield rates of good, bad, and repairable components that are harvested from incoming units, and probabilistic processing times and yields at each stage of the remanufacturing process. The approach provides estimates of the expected number of remanufactured units to be completed in each future period. In addition, we propose a procedure for generating a component purchase schedule to avoid shortages in periods with a low probability of meeting demand. The proposed methodology is applied to an antenna remanufacturing process at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). In this case study the proposed methodology identifies a potential shortage of a key component and suggests a corrective action to avoid significant delay in the delivery of remanufactured units.

A business process model of inspection in remanufacturing

“…A similar comment is made by Depuy et al [48]. This is especially the case when small numbers of parts which are not mass produced are concerned.…”

Artificial bee colony algorithm for scheduling and rescheduling fuzzy flexible job shop problem with new job insertion

“…In scout bee phase, a predetermined number of trials, Limit , is considered as an important parameter in ABC algorithm. To test the impact of Limit and set a better Limit value, the Best + Local ABC algorithm is employed to solve the fourth instance from remanufacturing engineering, Reman 4, with three Limit values, (i.e., 20 Fig. 8 shows the convergence curves from 100 to 10 0 0 iterations.…”

“…The fuzzy or uncertainty of processing time is one of seven characteristics of remanufacturing [17][18][19][20] . Beside the fuzzy or uncertainty of processing time, there is another scheduling related constraint in remanufacturing industry, which is new job insertion.…”

Integrating RFID with quality assurance system – Framework and applications

“…The RFID tags and readers can be applied in various stages of the QAS including acquisition, analyze, action, and audit phase to reduce the process variation and to enhance products quality (DePuy, Usher, Walker, & Taylor, 2007). The QAS focuses on document management.…”