Integrated Remanufacturing and Opportunistic Maintenance Decision-Making for Leased Batch Production Lines

Abstract

With the development of the product-service paradigm, many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have begun to provide remanufacturing services besides maintenance services as the lessors. An integrated contract including remanufacturing and maintenance service brings extra leasing profits and complex scheduling challenges as well. The use of machine remanufacturing in conjunction with system-level opportunistic maintenance (OM) has not been previously studied. This paper tries to integrate remanufacturing planning into maintenance optimizations for improved system performance in terms of saved leasing profits. An integrated remanufacturing and opportunistic maintenance (R&OM) policy is developed and applied to a leased manufacturing line in batch production. The system-level saved profit achieved via the R&OM policy is estimated and maximized through a sequential decision-making programming. Performing this integrated policy, it is possible to utilize the sequential R&OM opportunities raised from the random batch orders. In addition, preventive maintenance (PM) and preventive remanufacturing (PR) can be dynamically optimized to form profit-effective schemes. Numerical examples based on the collected information from a leased batch production line of engine crankshaft demonstrate that this proposed R&OM policy could efficiently achieve saved leasing profit maximization, reduce joint decision complexity, and expand OM theory.