Multi-product capacitated disassembly lot-sizing problem with lost sales and possibility of defective disassembly components

Abstract

One of the major disassembly problems is the number of defective disassembly components and uncertain return of end-of-life (EoL) products to be recovered from end user. In fact, if many disassembled components are defective or the quantity of EoL products to be recovered is inadequate, customer demand cannot be satisfied, and this generates lost sales. This paper addresses the multi-product capacitated disassembly lot-sizing problem with lost sales and possibility of defective disassembled items or components. The objective aims at determining the quantity of the EoL products to be disassembled in each period to minimize the total cost or maximize total profit earned by resale of the component recovered by disassembly operations. Hence, to maximize this total profit, a new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach allowing lost sales is firstly proposed. Secondly, three properties that can be used to determine the optimal solution are studied. Finally, the proposed model is solved using well-known CPLEX solver to both show the model performances and verify the limit of exact method. Test results showed that CPLEX was unable to solve all instances in reasonable computational time and an optimization approach method such as heuristic or meta-heuristic will be crucial to solve the large instances.