Design for automated inspection in remanufacturing: A discrete event simulation for process improvement

Remanufacturing is a process of restoring end-of-life (Eol) products to "as new" condition with a matching warranty. It offers significant economic benefits to remanufacturers as well as providing enormous environmental and social benefits. However, achieving remanufacturing is complex and uncertain due to varying product return quantity and quality. These uncertainties call for proper assessment of returned Eol products to extract the most value from them. The evaluation involves inspecting the Eol products on arrival for remanufacturing, thereby making the most appropriate Eol decisions. These decisions are made by expert personnel by visually assess these products manually or using semi-automated techniques. However, the accuracy of these decisions is subjective, time-consuming, and prone to missing defects. The need to develop processes and tools for efficient, reliable, and repeatable inspection in remanufacturing becomes inevitable. Automated inspection becomes handy to improve the assessment of these defects as well as saving time. This paper proposes design-forinspection as a tool to enhance remanufacturing. A discrete event simulation of this model for the torque converter remanufacturing process is presented and highlights the benefits of automating the remanufacturing inspection process. It further suggests the design improvements to obtain an enhanced automated inspection.