Integrated control policies of production, returns’ replenishment and inspection for unreliable hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing systems with a quality constraint

Abstract

This paper deals with the production planning and control problem within unreliable Hybrid Manufacturing-Remanufacturing Systems (HMRSs) evolving in a stochastic and dynamic environment. The customer demand can then be fulfilled by either manufacturing of new units or remanufacturing of returned ones. However, both used materials and returns may contain a fraction of defective items. The paper investigates how companies could benefit from such integrated control policy to assist their managers in determining production rates, the sequence and the size of replenishment orders as well as their sample size to be inspected. The corresponding problem aims to propose an efficient control policy integrating four central decisions to coordinate remanufacturing, manufacturing, replenishment of returns and their quality control while minimizing the total cost and satisfying a quality constraint requested by customers. A simulation-based optimization approach is used to tackle the problem. It aims to determine the optimal values of control parameters of the proposed policy minimizing the total cost. The results provide relevant insights and bring effective solutions to help decision makers manage simultaneously manufacturing, remanufacturing, replenishment of returns and their quality control activities. A comparative study is also performed showing that our policy, based on sampling inspection of delivered returns, outperforms in terms of costs those most used in the literature where complete (i.e. 100%) or no inspection strategies are used.