Abstract
Environmentally conscious manufacturing has gained more and more interests in recent years. For achieving it, closed-loop manufacturing system where products are made from used products, parts and materials taken-back from market, as well as new ones, should be established. Focusing on factories, complicated fluctuations of amount, quality, and timing of these taken-back resources make effective planning and control of these factories very difficult. The purpose of this study is to derive rules and conditions for operating these factories efficiently, through simulating these factories focused on material flow, with these various kinds of fluctuations. We also illustrate a prototype factory model we have developed for aiming at handling these fluctuations.
