Title: A smart decision making tool for cleaning process planning in remanufacturing

Authors: Juan Carlos Martinez; Zhenhua Wu; Jianzhi Li; Miguel Gonzalez

Addresses: Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX 78539, USA ' Manufacturing Engineering, Virginia State University, Petersburg, VA 23806, USA ' Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX 78539, USA ' Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering, The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX 78539, USA

Abstract: Equipping stakeholders with advanced tools to make better decisions for sustainable production is a key to research in smart manufacturing in the 21st century. A smart decision tool to select the optimal cleaning processes for remanufacturing is presented in this paper. The approach started from formulating the process selection problem to a linear programming model to minimise the cost while observing the constraints of part cleaning level, processing time, and energy consumption. In order to model the vague and uncertain information associated with contamination, cost, time and energy consumption, fuzzy sets were applied. Finally, a genetic algorithm was proposed to search for the optimal solution to the mathematical model. Further, a software prototype was coded in MATLAB® to validate the proposed approach. Two case study results show that the proposed approach can overcome the deficiency on handling information vagueness and multiple objectives when searching for optimal cleaning solutions in remanufacturing. The proposed approach is systematic; it can be integrated into process planning in remanufacturing.

Keywords: smart decision; cleaning; process planning; remanufacturing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRAPIDM.2020.107733

International Journal of Rapid Manufacturing, 2020 Vol.9 No.2/3, pp.167 - 193

Received: 25 Sep 2018
Accepted: 07 Nov 2018
Published online: 11 Jun 2020 *

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