Abstract

Sustainability is increasingly becoming a crucial concern in many aspects of life. Even though, there is a relatively growing interest from both academic researchers and practitioners in various design aspects of sustainability, one can see that design issues of sustainable manufacturing systems have not received adequate attention. Through an extensive literature review on design for sustainability and sustainability issues, it is observed that, attaining sustainability in manufacturing needs a huge amount of effort and needs to take into consideration many aspects from different perspectives. These include considering the sustainability in both the closed loop supply chain (CLSC) and the manufacturing system levels simultaneously, considering Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMSs), considering reconfigurability for the production systems, considering Hybrid Manufacturing-Remanufacturing Systems as well as considering the recovery options such as recycling and remanufacturing. This research presents a simultaneous investigation of Reconfigurable Cellular Manufacturing Systems and Hybrid Manufacturing-Remanufacturing Systems (HMRSs), and proposes an integrated approach in design optimization, analysis, and process planning aspects as an attempt to address to a large number of design issues for Sustainable Manufacturing Systems, while the options of remanufacturing, recycling, and disposing are introduced. Four mathematical model have been developed.
Third part cellular remanufacturing systems design are considered within the first model, which is initially formulated as a mixed integer non-linear program that incorporates multi-period production planning, dynamic system reconfiguration, and workforce management with deterministic production requirements. It consists the costs of machines maintenance and overhead, relocation costs for machines installation and removal, part holding cost, workers’ costs of salary, hiring, and firing, part intercellular movement cost, machine procurement cost, internal production cost, machine operating cost, the cost of acquiring the returned products, setup cost for disassembly operations, disassembly cost, the inventory cost of the returned products, parts disposal cost. Linearization procedures are proposed to convert it into a linearized mixed integer programming formulation. This linearized mixed integer program is solved using an exact solution (ES) procedure through the simplex-based branch and cut procedure of CPLEX software.
The second model considered the design of cellular hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing system, where manufacturing new products using an outsourced parts and remanufacturing using returned products are performed in the same facility by using shared resources. The overall objective of the model is to minimize the total cost of the three main categories of costs; 1) Machine cost: maintenance and overhead costs, relocation costs of installation and removal of machines, machine procurement costs, and machine operating costs, 2) Costs associated with manufacturing and remanufacturing: production costs for both new and remanufactured components, holding cost for new components, holding cost for remanufactured components, setup cost for new components, setup cost for remanufactured components, 3) Costs associated with returned products for remanufacturing: cost of acquiring the returned products, setup cost for disassembly operations, disassembly cost, and inventory cost of the returned products. Computational results and sensitivity analysis for an important design features are also reported.
The third model addresses the same attributes as the second one but an important extension is the introduction of recycling (for the end-of-life parts) and disposing of the parts with no further use. In addition, the new parts production in the third model are totally depends on the recycled parts coming from the recycling center, wherein the second model it depends on the raw material purchasing from outsourcing.
As the third model is the most comprehensive one, which considers a closed loop supply chain starts from a cellular hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing system and ends with the customer zone, through the introducing of different centers like, collection, disassembly, and recycling centers, and in order to have one more step toward the design of sustainable closed loop supply chain, the fourth model are formulated. The fourth model is designed to minimize the carbon foot prints and the total cost which contains the opening costs for different centers and the transportation costs between these centers
Keywords: Sustainability, Sustainable manufacturing system, cellular manufacturing systems design, Reconfigurable manufacturing system, mixed integer programming, Hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing system, Closed loop supply chain, Reverse logistics, Carbon footprints, Facility location.