Control policies of changeable manufacturing-remanufacturing systems using two failure-prone production facilities

This paper deals with the problem of production planning and control (PPC) within hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing systems (HMRSs), in which demand is fulfilled by either remanufacturing of returned items or manufacturing of new ones. It investigates how companies could benefit from changeable system settings with two production facilities operating in a stochastic and dynamic context. The rationale of such a system arises from its convertibility features that help to adapt the production process to internal (e.g., failures) and external (e.g., limited returned items) constraints. In this respect, we propose an integrated control policy that minimizes the long-term total cost by determining production and disposal rates as well as the switching strategy between manufacturing and remanufacturing modes. To tackle the problem, numerical techniques and optimal control theory are combined to characterize the control policy. A simulation-based approach is then used to optimize the resultant control parameters minimizing the total cost and to carry out sensitivity and comparative studies. The results illustrate the robustness of our approach showing its capability to assess the dynamic behaviour of integrated decisions and show that our proposal is more cost-effective compared to existing policies applied for different system settings with two facilities.