A Comparison of Production Policies in Remanufacturing Systems

In remanufacturing systems material management and production planning, unlike what happens in traditional production settings, are made difficult by a wider uncertainty affecting the quantity, the quality and the timing of recovered products/components. This instability makes the problem of defining an optimal inventory control policy more complicated as well as not unique within the product life cycle. In this article, after having reviewed the existing literature on inventory management in remanufacturing systems, a particular policy for material management and production planning in a hybrid remanufacturing system has been proposed. The considered model a multi stage inventory model. The comparison of the proposed policy with some others already present in literature, in different scenarios related to the product life cycle and with the change of several cost parameters, is carried out using the discrete event simulation approach. This allows us to identify in what circumstances such a policy is preferable to the others.