The research of online price quotation for the automobile parts exchange programme

Abstract

With the lack of virgin materials and the growing concerns for the environment, there has been an ever growing interest in reusing old products. In this paper, an online price quotation model (OPQM) for the ‘exchange the new part with the old one’ is proposed. The main aim of OPQM is to minimise the exchange price, based on jointly optimising the disassembly and remanufacturing plan for the used part throughout the supply chain. The disassembly and remanufacturing plan problem, however, resembles a combinatorial problem, whose computation time to obtain an optimal solution increases exponentially in proportion to the size of the problem. Therefore, the authors propose an enhanced particle swarm optimisation (EPSO) method to generate a relatively good solution within a given time. Through a series of experiments with several benchmark methods, the proposed EPSO method is found to be superior to the conventional optimisation methods, such as LINGO solver, in time, and preferable to the traditional particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) in quality.

Keywords:

• remanufacturing
• particle swarm optimisation
• price quotation

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (No. 70418013, 70501021). The authors express their sincere thanks to the anonymous referees, with whose valuable help the quality of the paper was very much improved.