2021 Volume 72 Issue 1 Pages 55-64
A variety of sustainable manufacturing systems have attracted attention socially. Particularly, remanufacturing systems that can reduce consumption of resources and industrial wastes are now required. Under these circumstances, closed-loop manufacturing systems (CLMSs) have been under developed for many years. The CLMS is a system composed of conventional forward logistics (FL) and reverse logistics (RL) that recover used products and use them in the remanufacturing process. Using this system, companies gain the image of being ecological and can experience profit. However, many manufacturing companies have hesitated to newly expand their business into remanufacturing because of concerns about upfront investments and profitability incurred at the time of implementing CLMS. This makes it difficult to maintain the sustainable manufacturing systems by operating CLMS. To cope with this problem, a useful support model is needed for decision-making related to the implementation of CLMS, making it more realistic and comprehensive. Although various studies on CLMS are actively being carried out, there are relatively few studies on decision-making problems concerning the introduction of RL.
In this paper, we propose a support model into make a decision of the implementation of CLMS on many operational cost factors. Moreover, in order to enhance the possibility of putting the model to practical use in the real world, we give reuse rates to the model according to the number of reuse cycles reported up to this point in time. Finally, through numerical experiments, we show that our model is able to support making decisions related to the implementation of CLMS.
