Customised design of remanufactured products and optimisation model for cores reuse

Abstract

As newly developed products, remanufactured products should be designed to meet the diversified and individual demands of the customers in fierce competitive markets. In this paper, a customised design framework is established considering the customers' heterogeneous demands and the constraints caused by the existing used products or parts. An optimisation model is constructed based on an unbalanced transportation problem to match and optimise the reuse relationship between the cores and the designed module family for diverse demands, and a method based on genetic algorithm for solving the model is proposed. Finally, the model is applied to the used boxes of speed reducers to examine its feasibility and validity.

Keywords:

• customised design
• optimisation model
• remanufactured products
• cores reuse

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (No. 2011CB013405), the Key Technologies R&D Program of China (No. 2011BAF11B09) and Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (No. 20110191110005).