Simultaneous consideration of remanufactured and new products in optimal product line design

Abstract

Remanufactured products are normally remanufactured from returned new products. Thus, they can be considered together with new products in product line design to obtain the maximum profit and market share of the product line. This paper proposes a methodology for optimal product line design with simultaneous consideration of remanufactured and new products which mainly involves development of dynamic demand models and multi-objective optimization. The optimization model is solved by nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) and optimal Pareto solutions of product line design that include specifications and prices of both remanufactured and new products, estimated profits and market share as well as the time of launching remanufactured products. A case study was conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.