Abstract
The ecological efficiency (EE) of the remanufacturing process occupies an important position in the whole index system of remanufacturing because it will directly affect the economic and environmental benefits of remanufacturing. Therefore, in order to study the EE of the remanufacturing process, a method is proposed to optimize and evaluate the EE of the remanufacturing process. In this method, firstly, the original remanufacturing sub-schemes of used components are designed according to the extracted fault characteristics; secondly, a set of optional process schemes are integrated by using directed graph (DG) to reduce the process schemes; thirdly, the objective function of EE is established, and then an ant colony algorithm with elite strategy (ES-ACO) is proposed to optimize the process schemes. After obtaining the optimal value of EE, the quality coefficient of used components can be calculated, and then numerical simulations (NS) are used to analyze the correlation between the quality coefficient and the optimized EE, after that, polynomial function fitting (PFF) is applied to construct the evaluation model of EE oriented to the quality coefficient, then, the evaluation model is utilized to analyze the range of quality coefficient of used components suitable for remanufacturing under cost constraints. Finally, the feasibility of this method is verified by the example of the used lathe spindle remanufacturing; and the case study shows that in the optimization phase, ES-ACO can not only optimize the process schemes but also has better performance than ACO; in the evaluation stage, the probability of deviation of the evaluation function established by using PFF is 5%, meeting the small probability event. (i.e., the occurrence of very low-frequency events), that is, the accuracy of the evaluation meets the requirements.
Highlights
IntroductionMore than 60% of the traditional old machine tools have been used for more than 10 years in China
At present, more than 60% of the traditional old machine tools have been used for more than 10 years in China
According to the parameter settings of ES-ACO and the optimization model of remanufacturing process schemes mentioned above, ES-ACO is run to get the optimal process scheme, whose specific information is shown in Tables 6 and 7
Summary
More than 60% of the traditional old machine tools have been used for more than 10 years in China. Eighty percent of the in-service construction machinery has exceeded their shelf life and about 800 million tons of solid waste are generated every year [1]. Since remanufacturing can maximize the development and utilization of the value contained in waste resources and reduce the environmental hazards of plenty of scrapped products, it has aroused widespread concern in academia and relevant industry. The traditional remanufacturing process was more concerned about whether the used components can produce more economic benefits through remanufacturing [2,3,4,5]. As the ecological problems become more and more serious in China, evaluating the remanufacturing process with the goal of economic benefits does not meet the requirements of ecological civilization construction. The literature [6,7,8] achieved the goal of simultaneously optimizing the economic benefits and environmental benefits of remanufacturing through multi-objective optimization, they used the Processes 2019, 7, 567; doi:10.3390/pr7090567 www.mdpi.com/journal/processes
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