Joint decision of product configuration and remanufacturing for product family design

Product family design (PFD) is a popular method for increasing product variety to satisfy the needs of diversified markets. With the increasing concern for environmental friendliness in society, more and more companies develop launching remanufactured products and include them in their product families. Therefore, PFD should be considered in a broad decision space where configuration of product variants and remanufacturing are considered simultaneously. However, this issue was not addressed properly in previous research. In this paper, a methodology for joint decision of product configuration and remanufacturing is proposed in which a bi-objective mixed integer programming model is formulated to determine the configurations of both new and remanufactured products for minimising product cost, maximising total market share, and satisfying reliability requirements. Then, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGAII) is adopted to solve the optimization problem. Computational experiments were conducted and their results show that NSGAII is convergent to the model well. A case study is presented to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.