Cost Of Remanufacturing Research Articles

The Impact of Maintenance and Technology Change on Remanufacturing as a Recovery Alternative for Used Wind Turbines

In the wind power industry, maintenance and technological evolution/improvement are critical factors to ensure low operations and maintenance (O&M) costs and keep the wind turbine (WT) available to generate power. In addition, these factors are critical in facilitating product recovery through remanufacturing at the end-of-use (EOU). Under a system dynamics (SD) approach, the interaction between maintenance, reliability, and technological obsolescence on the remanufacturing of a wind turbine was modeled. Findings suggest that regular preventive maintenance might avoid/slow functional obsolescence, and as a result, the remanufacturing cost is reduced. Technological change could lead to technological obsolescence. Both types of obsolescence might increase the overall remanufacturing cost. An increased remanufacturing cost will affect the attractiveness for recovery and profits obtained from original equipment manufacturers and the savings in the initial capital investment made by secondary customers.

A stochastic dynamic programming based model for uncertain production planning of re-manufacturing system

Re-manufacturing is recycling by manufacturing as-good-as-new products from used products, often involving disassembly, cleaning, testing, part replacement/repair, and re-assembly operations. Production planning and inventory control is one of the most important research issues for re-manufacturing system, which are faced with a greater degree of uncertainty and complexity. This leads to a critical need for planning and control systems designed to deal with the added uncertainty and complexity. We formulate a stochastic dynamic programming based model to study the production planning, i.e. dynamic lot sizing problem, of re-manufacturing systems. In the model the demand and return amounts are stochastic over the finite planning horizon. The objective is to determine the quantities that have to be re-manufactured at each period in order to minimise the total cost, including re-manufacturing cost, holding cost for returns and re-manufactured products and backlog cost. The optimal production plan of the re-manufacturing system over a finite planning horizon can be obtained with the policy iteration method. In the end, a numerical example is performed to illustrate how the model is applied and to prove its feasibility.

Optimal control of a hybrid periodic-review production inventory system with disposal

Due to growing environmental consciousness, limited availability of natural resources and enormous cost of waste disposal, recycling and remanufacturing of products are becoming more and more important. Reverse logistics is the process of producing and recycling a product. In this paper, a special structure reverse logistics system is considered. It contains two stocks. Items are subject to deterioration in either stock and the deterioration rate may be unknown. Units that can not be remanufactured are disregarded. The optimal control approach is developed to determine the optimal manufacturing, remanufacturing and disposal rates under a certain cost function. Illustrative examples are presented.