Analysis of Disassembly Systems in Remanufacturing using Kanban Control

Disassembly is the most critical stage of remanufacturing activities. The condition of parts disassembled for reuse/remanufacturing display a high variance. Hence demand for different parts found in a core cannot always be satisfied by a single core. At this point the question is whether to partially or fully disassemble the second core. In this paper, we concentrate on quantifying the potential benefits of this decision in a remanufacturing environment by using a queuing network model with kanban control. In our model, machine service times, demand and return arrival times to the remanufacturing facility are assumed to be independent and exponentially distributed random variables. The model is solved analytically by an approximate method to compare the performances of two different types of disassembly system.