Planned lead time determination in a make-to-order remanufacturing system

In recent years, remanufacturing has emerged as an important research area, due to the tendency of stricter environmental regulations in industry and the awakening to the economic attraction of recovering the products rather than the disposal alternative. This also requires developing manufacturing planning and control techniques to improve the performance of remanufacturing systems.

In order to reassemble finished products, new components are required since the recovery rate of return components can never reach 100%. When making a disassembly and procurement decision, we then need to balance the inventory holding cost and stockout cost. In the meantime, the process lead time depends on which disassembly and procurement option that is chosen. In this paper, we study a system where remanufacturing is driven by customer orders. A disassembly order is always released first and then the disassembly result determines whether a purchasing order is needed. Our objective is to examine the process lead time, which can be used to determine the planned lead time in production planning and control of remanufacturing. We start with disassembling a single-component case and then extend the model to a two-component scenario. We also investigate how the disassembly yield influences the system performance. Results of this study are intended to be implemented in a real-world engine remanufacturing environment.