As a consequence of environmental necessities, reuse of products has recently become an important issue for production and planning. Many companies are involved in retrieving used products, where they repair, refurbish and upgrade the products in order to sell them for profit. However, the regulations for many markets do not allow manufacturers to sell remanufactured products under the same pretence as new products. Therefore, companies are forced to differentiate both the recovery and the sales activities for the remanufactured products from that of the new products. In this paper, we study the impact of this differentiation. We particularly look at the feasibility of substituting one version of the product with the other in order to satisfy the demand. In the first phase of the study, we try to find optimal switching functions for substitution decisions using a Markov decision process. In the second phase, we define several control policies and compare them with respect to the expected total cost function of the system.

Date Published: 9 February 2001
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 4193, Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing, (9 February 2001);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4193:
Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing
Surendra M. Gupta, Editor(s)