Simulation on Remanufacturing Cost by Considering Quality Grade of Returns and Buffer Capacity

Selecting the remanufacturing system as object of the study, the buffer capacity is served as control variable, and design of experiment(DOE) and simulation are used to analyze the effect that uncertain quality of returns acts on system performance. The remanufacturing time and the recovery rate in each station are used to represent the quality level of the returns, and the variance of remanufacturing time is used to denote the variability of returns' quality. Three factors(the variability, the proportion and the recovery rate) of different quality levels in returns are considered. By analyzing the variance and the range of the simulation results, some important conclusions are obtained: recovery rate affects the remanufacturing cost by far, and the variability has the minimum influence; furthermore, for the returns, the more obvious of the dispersion degree, the higher proportion of the high-level quality, and the higher of the recovery rate, the lower the cost of remanufacturing will be.