Refurbishment and remanufacturing planning model for pre-owned consumer electronics

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in modelling and solving a flow and resource planning problem related to the trade-in, treatment and resale of pre-owned consumer electronic products. This problem is motivated and inspired by the flows and the processes of the company Recommerce Group, which mainly handles traded-in used smartphones in Europe, but also used tablets, smartwatches, game consoles, laptops, etc. Collected products must be directed to refurbishment centres. After having been recorded, cleaned, tested and reset, they may be refurbished, or remanufactured by a subcontractor. They may also remain in their initial state. Finally, they are sold on diversified channels. This problem can be generalised to other refurbishment and remanufacturing activities of used consumer electronic products. We first formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program and show its NP-hardness. In order to solve large size real-life instances, mixed-integer programming based heuristic approaches are proposed. Extensive computational experiments on realistic instances are conducted to show the advantages and the limits of the proposed approaches. Several managerial insights are investigated and analysed.

Keywords:

• Production planning
• refurbishment
• remanufacturing
• circular economy
• Relax-and-Fix

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available as supplementary material.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xavier Schepler

Xavier Schepler is currently a Data Scientist developing optimisation solutions in the supply chain industry. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Le Havre in 2015. His main research area is discrete optimisation, with applications to supply chain planning and transportation.

Nabil Absi

Nabil Absi is a full professor at the department of Manufacturing Sciences and Logistics of the Center of Microelectronics in Provence (CMP) of Mines de Saint-Etienne. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pierre et Marie Curie in 2005 and his Habilitation Degree From the University of Jean-Monnet in 2012. His main research area is discrete optimisation, with applications to supply chain planning and transportation.

Antoine Jeanjean

Antoine Jeanjean is co-founder of Recommerce Group. He was the company's R&D Director until 2021. He is currently a Senior Consultant at OPT2A and still an Advisor for Recommerce and CircularX. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from École Polytechnique in 2011. His main research area is discrete optimisation, with applications to revenue management, supply chain planning and transportation.