Research On Time Interval Decision-Making And Control Methods For Active Remanufacturing

Recently, remanufacturing engineering has been rapidly developed because of its great resource potential, remarkable economic benefit and prominent environmental protection function. Remanufacturing has become an important way of manufacturing industry to save energy and materials in the new era. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the concept of active remanufacturing was presented in this article, combined with the life cycle theory of products. What’s more, the topics about the time interval decision-making, the product structure improvement design for active remanufacturing and its influence on the active remanufacturing time interval were thoroughly discussed. The research contents of this article are mainly represented in the following aspects:Using House of Quality (HOQ), factors of remanufacturing design are analyzed and evaluated, and then information model is built to support the design for remanufacturing.The concept of active remanufacturing is first presented, and the model of time interval decision-making method for active remanufacturing has been built. The time interval of active remanufacturing is divided into the upper limit and lower limit, and is discussed respectively to solve the timing choice problem for active remanufacturing at the design stage. Life cycle energy consumption and life cycle cost are used as optimization factors to be analyzed in the process of determining the high limit of the range. The conflict issues between the energy consumption and the cost factors are converted into mathematical model for conflict resolution based on the game theory. In the process of determining the low limit of the range, this article put forward features value index of parts deterioration and predicts the critical state moment for the parts lost remanufacturing value by establishing the mapping relationships between various indexes and service time based on the artificial neural networks.The structure improvement design method for remanufacturing is presented, and the influence of the specific structure design to the active remanufacturing time interval is revealed. This article carries out the study of structure improvement design from two aspects: product modularization configuration for remanufacturing and parts structure improvement. Module partition standards are established, and module optimization is achieved by correlation degree analysis in/between modules, and the structure of parts is improved based on TRIZ. After structure improvement is done, the quantitative relationship between structure character parameter and time interval optimization factors is analyzed to reveal the influence of structure improvement at design parameters layer on the active remanufacturing time interval. The Time Interval Decision-Making and Structure Improvement Aided System for Active Remanufacturing (TIDM) was developed. This system, which can promote the application of research methods, is consist of active remanufacturing time interval ascertaining module, structure conflict resolution based on TRIZ module and remanufacturing possibility evaluation module et al.