A Robust Optimization Approach to Multiperiod Remanufacturing
Planning with Uncertain Quality of Inputs
ABSTRACT
2013 National Grants
Industrial Engineering
In this project, we consider a tactical production planning problem where inputs have different quality levels. The situation
considered is typical of most remanufacturing environments, where inputs (cores) are used product returns and they
must be remanufactured to achieve a certain quality in order to be re-disposed to the market. As an example, a computer
firm’s remanufacturing facility may receive a shipment of returned laptops from one of its customers. Each laptop must be
remanufactured to a predetermined configuration and quality level before being offered again for sale. Although there is large
body of literature in classical production planning, remanufacturing planning poses significant additional challenges and
there is currently a growing body of literature addressing planning operations for remanufacturing. An important problem that
arises in emanufacturing is that although the returned products can initially be categorized into different quality categories,
the exact remanufacturing costs for returned