دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تعیین کمیت بهینه و سطوح کیفیت محصولات دست دوم برای تولید دوباره تحت کیفیت نامطمئن - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

Managing product returns has been considered essential in the production planning and control of remanufacturing, as well as in the inventory control management of product returns. Uncertainties in the quantity and quality of returned products collected for remanufacturing could largely affect the profit generated from remanufactured products. However, determining the optimal quantity and quality levels of used products to be collected for remanufacturing in multiple periods under uncertain quality of the returns has not been properly addressed in previous studies. On the other hand, the effects of new product sales and demand for remanufactured products on used product returns, as well as the effect of quality of returns on the takeback and remanufacturing costs, have not been properly considered in previous studies. In this paper, a novel methodology is proposed to determine the optimal product returns for remanufacturing with consideration of the uncertainty in the quantity and quality of returns and study the effects of new product sales and demand for remanufactured products on used product returns, as well as the effect of quality of returns on the remanufacturing cost. A case study of determining the optimal returns of tablet PCs is conducted to illustrate the proposed methodology.

Conclusions and future work

Managing product returns has been found to be essential in the production planning and control for remanufacturing and inventory control management of product returns. However, considerable uncertainties have been found in the quantity, timing, and quality of returned products. Most of the previous studies considered product returns and demands for remanufactured and new products separately and stochastic distribution theory was quite often used to model the returns and the demands. However, the demand for remanufactured and new products may not follow a random distribution model. On the other hand, the effects of demand for remanufactured products and sales of new products on product returns have not been addressed properly in previous studies. The effect of quality of returns on the take-back and remanufacturing costs were also not considered in previous studies. However, both acquisition price and remanufacturing cost are highly dependent on the quality of returns. In this paper, a novel methodology is proposed to determine the optimal quantity and quality levels of used products to be collected for remanufacturing with consideration of multi-period and uncertain quality of the returns. The effects of sales of new products and demand for remanufactured products on product returns are also addressed in the proposed methodology. Post-optimality analyses were performed on the different quality scenarios and inventory cost consideration. The implementation results of a case study of tablet PCs indicate that the inventory cost of returned tablet PCs would lead to 0.5 to 1.1% changes in the total cost of remanufactured tablet PCs, whereas the uncertainty in the quality of returns would result in 4 to 6% changes in the total cost.