Research On Leader-Follower Joint Optimization Of Product Family Design With Remanufacturing Consideration

Product family design based on modular product platform meets various market demands at lower cost.Optimization methods and techniques are widely used in product family design and development.Growing environmental concerns and strict regulations have driven enterprises to provide remanufactured products to customers.Product family design considering remanufacturing can reduce the difficulty of product disassembly and remanufacturing while meeting customerized demands.In this dissertation,a bilevel optimization method is used to investigate leader-follower joint optimization problems in the design of product family with remanufacturing consideration.The main work is divided into the following five parts:(1)The relevant literatures are reviewed,including the optimization problems in product family design and development,design for remanufacturing,design for upgrading,closed-loop supply chain configuration,competition and coordination in closed-loop supply chain,as well as bilevel programming and its solving algorithms.(2)Decision chain framework for leader-follower joint optimization of product family design is developed through sorting and analyzing the relevant literature.(3)In the stage of the product design,for the optimization problem of product family configuration considering remanufacturing,a 0-1 mixed integer nonlinear bilevel programming is formulated with the product family configuration as a leader and the remanufacturing decision as a follower.To solve this bilevel model,a nested genetic algorithm is developed.A case study of a simplified mobile phone product family is reported to demonstrate the rational and potential of the proposed leaderfollower joint optimization approach.Moreover,two experiments are design to compare the obtained results with those derived from a non-joint optimization method and an all-in-one method.(4)The joint optimization of product family configuration with remanufacturing consideration and closed-loop supply chain is proposed to be as a leader-two followers Stackelberg game,then a nonlinear bilevel optimization model is formulated.The upper-level objective is to maximize the integrated index for the profit of manufacturer and the environmental impact saving,and the lower-level objectives are the total profit of supplers and the total profit of subcontract remanufacturers,respectively.A bilevel nested genetic algorithm is developed to solve the proposed model.A refrigerator product family is used to illustrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed leader-follwers model and algorithm,and three experiments are developed to compare the obtained result with those derived by the traditional two stage,as well as by maximizing the manufacturer’s profit and maximizing the environmental impact saving,respectively.A sensitivity analysis is conducted.(5)A nonlinear bilevel optimization model is established for leader-follower joint optimization of product family configuration and remanufacturing considering upgrade.A bilevel nested genetic algorithm is developed to solve this bilevel model.An industrial case of desktop computer product family is demonstrated to the rationality and feasibility of the proposed model and algorithm,and an experiment is conducted to compare the obtained results with the result gained from a two-stage method.