Production planning of an unreliable hybrid manufacturing–remanufacturing system under uncertainties and supply constraints

Abstract

This paper falls within the emerging business of remanufacturing by considering a hybrid system that uses both raw materials and returned products in the production process. Such a system brings greater managerial complexity as compared to traditional manufacturing systems especially with the presence of random events (e.g. facilities failures, delivery lead times of raw materials and returns). Thus, the determination of appropriate storage spaces and adaptive strategies to manage the manufacturing, remanufacturing and disposal operations as well as the supply of both raw materials and returns, is an important issue. This work mainly aims to propose an efficient structure of joint control policies integrating simultaneously the production and disposal activities as well as the procurement of both return and raw material. The latter has been overlooked in the literature dealing with hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing systems (HMRS). To tackle the problem, relevant control policies developed in close contexts were implemented and revised after deep studies. A simulation-based optimization approach is applied to determine the optimal control parameters including the raw material supply and the storage space sizing of finished products, raw materials and returns while minimizing the total incurred cost. An in-depth sensitivity analysis is conducted showing the robust behavior and the usefulness of the proposal. For all tested instances, the results show that the proposed control policies lead to important cost savings, which varies between 6.26% and 54.14% compared to those implemented from literature, not considering simultaneous management of raw materials and returns. Valuable insights providing a better understanding of interactions involving manufacturing, remanufacturing, disposal and procurement of both returns and raw materials are also discussed.