A economic lot scheduling problem for manufacturing and remanufacturing

Recently, remanufacturing has received more and more attention by many manufacturers. It is economical to schedule manufacturing and remanufacturing on the same single product line due to setup cost saving. In this paper, we extend the classical economic lot scheduling problem to schedule the manufacturing and remanufacturing on the same single product line. We assume that the demand rate and return rate are constant and the product line has limited capacity of manufacturing and remanufacturing. We employ the Common Cycle approach to coordinate manufacturing with remanufacturing such that the total cost of per unit time is minimized. Furthermore, many numerical examples are presented to show the effects of return rate on the performance of this manufacturing/remanufacturing hybrid system.