Abstract
Many industries have mass-produced and consumed excessive amounts of resources with consideration for only economical efficiency. Most of the products are discarded at the end of their lifetime. Therefore, an important issue is how to deal with used products that have become outdated. With respect to saving resources and environmentally conscious manufacturing, the discarded products should be recovered and their components used to make new products. In a traditional inventory control problem, we focused on inventory on-hand in the system. In a remanufacturing system, however, we should consider all the products which have been bought by customers as the inventory in the factory. This paper proposes a remanufacturing system model with stochastic variability such as customer demand, recovery rate and so on. A product manufactured by this system has its own lifetime and will be taken back from the customers by a specific period. We have utilized the theory of a perishable inventory control to develop a new model of inventory management for remanufacturing systems. In this system, we propose to manage inventory at every point, until products are collected and used in remanufacturing. The numerical examples are given to show the effect of changing the amount of new products and the recovery rates under stochastic demand.
