Production Planning and Inventory Control in Hybrid Systems with Remanufacturing

This paper is on production planning and inventory control in systems where manufacturing and remanufacturing operations occur simultaneously. Typical for these hybrid systems is, that both the output of the manufacturing process and the output of the remanufacturing process can be used to fulfil customer demands. Here, we consider a relatively simple hybrid system, related to a single component durable product. For this system, we present a methodology to analyse a PUSH control strategy (in which all returned products are remanufactured as early as possible) and a PULL control strategy (in which all returned products are remanufactured as late as convenient). The new aspect of the proposed methodology consists herein, that it combines the evaluation of the long-run and the transient behaviour of various continuous time Markov Chain models. The other contributions of this paper are, to compare traditional systems without remanufacturing to PUSH and to PULL controlled systems with remanufacturing. Furthermore, we advice management on various actions that could be taken to reduce production and inventory related costs in hybrid systems.